


All That Glitters

by asroarke



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Adultery, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Extramarital Affairs, F/M, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Jealousy, Protectiveness, Slow Burn, Sneaking Around, War, spy!bellamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-10-05 16:23:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20491745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asroarke/pseuds/asroarke
Summary: He’s a spy. Far from the best one that Marcus Kane trained, but the one who managed to get an invitation for dinner at Mr. Wallace’s estate in Mt. Weather. It’s not his original assignment, but when one recruit falls, the others have to cover more ground.There’s an informant who regularly attends these parties, someone who provided the last recruit vital intel until his cover almost blew months ago and he had to flee back to Arkadia. Bellamy doesn’t know much about the informant. Kane said whoever it is would find him but said nothing else about the informant, most likely to protect them in case Bellamy fails and gets caught. The only important clue he has about them is that they cannot seem to get information out any other way. And that tells Bellamy that the informant is watched, which is more than enough information to go on.A Spy AU where Bellamy's only assignment is to keep attending Cage Wallace's lavish parties so that Kane's informant can keep slipping him messages, but the mission gets complicated when he falls for his enemy's wife.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Same kind of posting schedule as Drag Me Down. I'm halfway through writing this (I think), so I'll update once a week until I do finish writing it, then we'll go back to two updates a week once I've gotten all the chapters written. Cool? Cool. 
> 
> Canon reminder: the guard Bellamy killed and stole the uniform from in season two was Sgt. Lovejoy, so that's where Bellamy's alias comes from. (I'm reminding y'all because I didn't remember that part, low key gave him a dumb alias before I remembered canon, and then went through a wikia spiral looking for the exact name yikes)
> 
> We got a mod podge of villains here because it's my party and I'll blend together all the seasons if I want to.

No one warned him about the state of Mt. Weather. Intel has been hard to get out of this area since Russell Lightbourne rose to power, but as Bellamy rides through this once beautiful city, he can’t believe how quickly it has fallen from its former glory. Marcus Kane described it as an oasis. The cultural center of Sanctum. Lots of theaters and art museums. Dozens of high fashion shops and luxurious hotels. But the once middle class community is now overrun with children and widows living on the street, unable to get by after their fathers and spouses were executed by Lightbourne’s men for being dissenters. Most businesses have shut down, putting the rest of the men out of work unless they were lucky enough to get a job at Wallace’s factory. The people here are starving, far more so than in the other parts of the country Bellamy has traveled to. He knows a thing or two about not having enough to eat, and that makes what he’s doing even harder.

Bellamy fidgets in his tux, hating how heavy it feels on him. How much he spent on it could have fed every starving person he drives past tonight. The car stops so a few pedestrians can pass, and Bellamy makes the mistake of looking out the window. A man with a thin face locks eyes with him and spits toward the car. Without missing a beat, Bellamy shoots him a murderous glare. One so vicious that the woman with him gives a desperate apology.

No doubt that both of them will lie awake tonight wondering if that one act of disrespect will inspire Bellamy to label them dissenters and send Lightbourne’s men to kill the man. He hates himself for scaring them. Despite not knowing Bellamy, they have every reason to hate him. The tux and personal driver and the rounded face of someone who has been well fed labels him as one of the elite, someone who has profited while the rest of the country suffers. But he had to keep up appearances. One act of kindness is enough to ruin everything he has worked for, and he’s not going to slip up when he is so close to the Wallace’s home.

He’s a spy. Far from the best one that Marcus Kane trained, but the one who managed to get an invitation for dinner at Mr. Wallace’s estate in Mt. Weather. It’s not his original assignment, but when one recruit falls, the others have to cover more ground.

There’s an informant who regularly attends these parties, someone who provided the last recruit vital intel until his cover almost blew months ago and he had to flee back to Arkadia. Bellamy doesn’t know much about the informant. Kane said whoever it is would find him but said nothing else about the informant, most likely to protect them in case Bellamy fails and gets caught. The only important clue he has about them is that they cannot seem to get information out any other way. And that tells Bellamy that the informant is watched, which is more than enough information to go on.

The Wallace’s home in Mt. Weather is a literal castle, perhaps an older one the last regime sold to their family to try to get out of debt. A last-ditch effort to keep Mr. Wallace’s loyalty that ultimately proved futile since he armed Lightbourne’s rebellion. The man owns at least two other homes and a suite inside a hotel in Sanctum’s capital, though the suite is only so his wife has somewhere nice to stay during her monthly shopping trips. Then, there are all the munitions factories he owns across the country. One single man should not have this kind of wealth when his countrymen are dying from starvation all around him.

His driver stops in front of the steps, and a servant opens Bellamy’s door. “Mr. Lovejoy,” he says with a bow when Bellamy steps out. He hates how easily he responds to that name now. Sometimes, he wonders if he is even capable of responding to Blake anymore. Maybe Bellamy Blake died the day Echo gave him Lovejoy’s name.

Thinking of her reminds him how wrong he is for this assignment. Echo would have been perfect for it, though. She slipped in and out of identities so seamlessly that it was hard to remember who Echo actually was underneath it all. Then again, who he thought Echo was might not have been the truth. After she defected, Kane informed him that her real name was Ash all along. Despite everything the two of them had been through, she didn’t trust him enough to tell him who she really was. And though it hurts to think about, it proves just how perfect she would be for this job. Whereas Bellamy is prone to getting attached, as Echo proved perfectly. Bellamy Blake is the last one who should be walking into the belly of the beast tonight. And yet, here he is.

Another servant waits at the top of the steps to take Bellamy’s coat. Inside, quartet music plays and chatter fills the building. A few individuals that he passes by are familiar, if only because he has been studying them all so closely in the last few months. No one takes notice of him. He’s going to be one of the least important guests of the evening, and he’s just fine with that. Still, one he gets past the foyer, Cage Wallace himself notices him and does his host duty by crossing over with his wife to greet Bellamy.

Cage has at least ten years on Bellamy. His dark hair is slicked back immaculately, and the watch on his wrist has to be worth at least what it took to feed him, his mother, and sister for a year during the rough years. On his arm is his favorite accessory, his wife.

Though the makeup caked on her face makes her look about Bellamy’s age, he knows that she is only nineteen. In preparation for tonight, Bellamy skimmed through the old article from the society pages about their wedding. Clarke Griffin, daughter of Jake and Abigail Griffin, became Mrs. Wallace just over a year ago. She used to be an aspiring artist before she gave up her passion for the love of her life, the reporter wrote. In reality, she’s just a girl who caught a very powerful man’s eye. That’s all he really knows about her, and it’s all he needs to know. It’s her husband Bellamy needs to learn about.

Still, he can’t help but note the glittering red gown and diamond earrings hidden behind her golden curls and wonder if she even understands what her husband does to earn the money that buys all her pretty dresses and jewelry. Does she know that the expensive floral perfume she wears was bought with the money Cage got from arming Lightbourne’s men? Does she know the body count of the Sanctum citizens executed with the very guns that afforded her this lovely home? Probably not.

“Mr. Lovejoy, I presume,” Cage says. His hand extends toward Bellamy, and when he meets him for a shake, his grip is far too firm. A power move Bellamy is all too familiar with. He lets the man hurt his hand because doing anything else would make Bellamy more noticeable. Cage doesn’t think much of weak men, and weak men have weak handshakes. So, that is what Bellamy must be. Weak Mr. Lovejoy. A young widower who still wears his wedding band. A quiet fellow who disappears into the background. Someone forgettable, dull, and gives a weak handshake.

Though he does take comfort knowing that Bellamy could kill this man with his bare hands. Just like he killed the real Mr. Lovejoy. He won’t, but he likes knowing that he can.

“Yes, Mr. Wallace. I greatly appreciate your invitation.”

“And might I introduce you to my wife.” He gestures toward Mrs. Wallace, but it’s clear by his shift of attention that a more important guest has arrive behind Bellamy. She is undistracted, though. Her bright blue eyes stay focused on Bellamy. Her sweet smile is the contagious kind. Though he still loathes her for being complicit in her husband’s work, he finds the corners of his mouth tugging upward of their own accord as he greets her.

“Mrs. Wallace,” Bellamy greets her, lifting her gloved hand to his lips. He makes no move to continue conversation and lets the two of them greet their newest arrival.

Bellamy takes a glass of champagne off a server’s tray and makes his way to Roan, the man who made this invitation happen. He’s Bellamy’s employer who made the mistake of taking Bellamy under his wing upon receiving an impressive letter of introduction from one of Kane’s old aliases. Being Roan King’s right hand man makes him important enough to be invited to events like these, and it’s finally paid off.

The guests are a strange mix of people. Mostly businessmen who work in munitions, like Bellamy and Roan. A few officers. The mayor. A few low-ranking royals like Count Desai. And the wives, of course. Though, they form clusters together far from their powerful husbands. Well, most of them.

Mrs. Wallace seems to float around the party, playing perfect hostess as she checks in on all the guests. At first, he’s shocked by how many men openly stare at her. Men like Cage Wallace are typically the controlling types, the ones who would punch a man for staring at his wife. But as Bellamy looks around the excessively decorated castle with Tiffany’s glass vases on the mantle and ornate gold trim on the ceilings, he realizes that not only does Cage not mind these men ogling his wife but encourages it. To him, his wife is just an extension of his property, and he wants everyone to envy what he has, including her. The theory is confirmed when he sees how Cage grabs her in front of his friends, ignoring the flash of embarrassment on his wife’s face.

The thought makes Bellamy feel sick. And maybe a bit guilty for writing her off as a pretty face who got lucky. It’s not her fault Cage Wallace picked her out to be his latest trophy to flaunt in front of his partners and acquaintances.

There is a clear hierarchy at the dinner table. Mr. and Mrs. Wallace sit at opposite ends of the table, and the most important guests are seated nearer to them. Influencers, nobility, and artistic types closer to Mrs. Wallace, and the people with money and Lightbourne’s ear closer to Mr. Wallace. Bellamy finds himself in the middle. It’s a poor position to network and get a leg up in society, but it’s a perfect vantage point to survey the guests and look for his informant.

Bellamy turns his attention to other people like himself, the ones important enough to be here yet not important enough to warrant attention. These are the people who feel slighted, maybe the kind to decide to help the enemy to feel important again. In each conversation he has, he looks for any sign of this informant but ends up with dozens of suspects. It’s not his job to find them, he knows. Kane said the informant will find him. But still, he can’t help but look.

After the meal, the guests are led into a ballroom. Musicians play. Couples dance. No informant approaches Bellamy. He tries stepping onto an abandoned balcony, hoping they would take the invitation to make themselves known. But still nothing. As the evening comes to a close, Bellamy feels his heart sink. The mission is a failure. Not his fault, of course. He followed his instructions to a tee. Perhaps the informant is long gone now. It has been months since one of Kane’s spies could infiltrate one of these dinner parties. The informant could have been fired from whatever position they held, or, worse and more likely, executed for dissent.

He thanks Mr. and Mrs. Wallace for a lovely party, takes his coat, and leaves with his head held high despite wanting to scream. Even though Bellamy isn’t the most impressive spy, he’s never failed a mission. This informant, whoever they were, was able to give the last spy sketches of prototype weapons on their weak points, lists of locations and dates for meetings with important generals, and other information that has been invaluable to Arkadia and Polis as they wait for war to finally break out. The loss of access to the informant has been devastating enough all these months. The loss of the informant permanently will be far worse.

Bellamy is dropped at his small apartment in the early hours of the morning. When he digs into his coat pocket to get his keys, he feels paper inside them. Bellamy locates his key and fights every urge to pull those papers out and see what they are until he’s safely inside. No one is out at this hour, but if this is what he hopes it is, it’s not worth the risk.

Once inside, he empties the contents of his pockets onto his bed. One folded up sheet of paper contains a sketch of what appears to be a new torpedo design. The informant must have stolen an original sketch of it or is very good at copying. Another contains a list of dates and locations with a code for Kane written in the top corner. Half of them are crossed out, all the dates that have passed in the months since the last spy could make his way into a Wallace dinner party. The last piece of paper is a map ripped from a book with a hand-drawn circle around one of the galleries in Sanctum. Though Bellamy isn’t sure, he’d guess this is one of the locations that Wallace’s men smuggle weapons to Lightbourne.

All exhaustion leaves him as he prepares these new documents for the next drop. The mission isn’t a failure. The informant still lives, and whoever it is still wants to help the Arkadians keep peace.

Too bad he has no idea who it is.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm switching to Sundays for updates. Mondays are the devil's work and I don't want to have anything to do with them.

The informant never makes themselves known to Bellamy. Over two months, Bellamy is invited to three more parties. Each one ends in Bellamy finding papers in his coat. One more time in his pocket, then his informant finds the slit sewn into the sleeves, designed that way to hide messages, and slips them in there the next two times.

At the third party, the inevitable news is left in his coat. A bombing at Tondc just a week away. The first official act of war against Polis, and Arkadia will be dragged into the war soon after because that’s how alliances go. It’s the kind of intel that could change the course of history, and Bellamy shakes with excitement as he expedites this information to Kane. They could take down the planes long before they get close to Tondc. Get the upper hand early on. Make other countries think twice about their alliances with Sanctum.

But when the date of the bombing comes, nothing stops it. Thousands die despite Bellamy’s warning. He knows instantly what happened. Lexa, the newest leader of Polis, didn’t want to tip off her enemies that she had inside knowledge of the attack. She probably spent the week removing valuable resources and important people from Tondc and let Sanctum bomb the rest, knowing the outrage alone would do more to rally her troops than she ever could.

If Bellamy wasn’t certain that Lightbourne would wreak havoc on Arkadia like he has here in Sanctum, he would walk away from this assignment just for this. But he still has his little sister back home to worry about. One last person he loves that he can protect by continuing his work, so he stays put. But he hates it. He hates his job. Bellamy’s intel could have saved thousands of civilians, and it was instead used to relocate armories and soldiers.

The next dinner party at the Wallace’s home doesn’t waste any time being somber over the start of the war. After all, the people inside it are the ones who designed the bombs that killed all those people or who helped create the plan to bomb them. Champagne flows freely, and half the party is drunk before dinner begins. Everyone has opinions on the war, most of which are the same horrible logic even though everyone thinks they have a unique take on it. Bellamy grins and bears it, but every forced smile kills him inside. Here he is sipping champagne and mimicking the bigoted rants of these wealthy monsters… meanwhile, the boys he grew up with back home are being shipped to the front.

Dancing breaks out after dinner. Bellamy glues himself to Roan, the only tolerable person at this party. His employer is from Azgeda and takes no side on the war. Normally, Bellamy gets angry at his indifference. But his lack of emotion over the war is preferable to the celebrating going on around them. Neither of them speak, and Bellamy hopes to spend the rest of the evening being ignored.

Luck isn’t on his side, though. Mr. Wallace’s drunk wife spots him while Roan tries to locate something stronger to drink. Her smile is positively giddy, and he decides that he hates her. Bellamy doesn’t care if she’s too shallow or dumb to comprehend what her husband and Lightbourne are doing. She’s complicit, just like everyone else.

“Mr. Lovejoy,” she giggles, and Bellamy bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. Her glittering emerald dress swishes around as she skips up to him. “Will you dance with me?”

Mrs. Wallace holds her hand out to him with a slight pout on her dark red lips, and he knows that he will look like a monster if he refuses. But right now, he doesn’t care. He wants to hurt her feelings and make her feel rejected for once in her life. She might not have made the bombs or ordered them to strike Tondc, but she benefits from it all the same.

“I don’t dance well, Mrs. Wallace,” he replies, still trying to sound polite so he doesn’t do irreparable damage to his relationship with her husband. “Perhaps when Mr. King comes back, you could persuade him.”

Something flashes in those blue eyes of hers, something more serious than should flicker through the gaze of a drunk girl. Clarke isn’t used to rejection. Too many parties where she is the prettiest woman in the room and holding the attention of anyone she wants it from. He could imagine that a man turning her down would make something snap in her. Good. He’s drunk enough that the little voice in his head, the one that went silent months into his training, tells him to shake her and say that he has real problems to deal with and doesn’t have time for her hurt feelings.

Whatever passes through her eyes disappears just as quickly, and Mrs. Wallace breaks into a giggle. She grabs his arm and gives him a firm pull. “You’ll dance with me,” she tells him with a slight slur in her speech, and even though she’s giggling, it feels like the kind of authoritative order Kane would give him.

Bellamy doesn’t resist as she drags him out to the floor. Now that he has had a second to let his temper pass, he realizes that he shouldn’t have said no in the first place. Any other night, and he would have obliged her with a smile when she asked. This is Mr. Wallace’s wife, and though she doesn’t have the kind of power here that Cage does, she has enough that she could convince her husband not to invite Bellamy ever again, leaving him with no access to his informant.

God. He had forgotten about his informant. They’re probably furious about Tondc too. Or maybe they don’t care. It’s probably one of Cage’s ignored partners, one who is hedging his bets just in case Sanctum loses the war. The informant probably just shrugged when the news about Tondc came on the radio.

The dancefloor isn’t too crowded. Too many people are drunk, now lounging in the corners or choking down water. It’s rather quiet and spread out now. People seem to talk as they dance, but Bellamy cannot hear a word of it.

It’s apparent that Bellamy was lying about not dancing well. All those years of Octavia making him dance with her makes it impossible to hide the skill. But Mrs. Wallace doesn’t mention it. They dance in silence, her gloved hand in his and the other on his shoulder. He keeps the hand on her back as high as possible, trying to make sure their dancing looks entirely platonic since her husband watches them from across the room. Bellamy wonders if that man ever takes his eyes off his wife.

Bellamy spins her, and when her hand comes back to his shoulder, she ends up a little too close to him. Her chest grazes against his, and her floral perfume seems to surround him. When he tries to pull back, she subtly closes the distance again.

“Tell me, Mr. Lovejoy,” she whispers right into his ear. His heart pounds as he glances at Mr. Wallace, but thankfully, his back is to them now. What is she doing? Her husband is right there. Surely, she isn’t flirting with Bellamy. “Is it you or your employer who is incompetent?”

The slur in her speech is gone. And now that he thinks about it, she’s dancing a little too well for a girl who drank her weight in champagne.

“I am not sure what you mean.” Bellamy tries to sound as smooth and composed as possible, but everything about this feels unnerving. Off. Wrong. The same way he felt right before Echo ripped the rug out from under him. “If you have an issue with the work Mr. King and I have—”

“Not that employer.”

In three words, she manages to make his entire body stiffen. How could she possibly know what he is? Bellamy has been careful, so very careful. Done everything he could to disappear into the background, and somehow, she noticed him. He knows what his real mistake was. He dismissed Clarke Wallace as a pretty yet ditsy socialite, and in doing so, he never considered she might be watching him.

“Again, I am not sure what you mean, Mrs. Wallace,” he murmurs. He spins her slowly, making note of the possible exits. But if this is a trap, he won’t get out alive. The Wallace estate is a fortress in of itself, and Bellamy would be naïve to think he could escape a party where Lightbourne’s favorite generals are guests.

“Then, let me be more clear,” she hisses. She gives him more space, letting him finally see her face again. She’s smiling sweetly, like the belligerent drunk he mistook her to be. But the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “If I tell you of a planned attack, I expect you and your employer to put a stop to it.”

Bellamy blinks rapidly as he processes this. She’s talking about Tondc. _This_ is his informant? The pretty young wife of the biggest arms dealer in Sanctum. The girl who bats her eyelashes and giggles obnoxiously at any joke. The one who has traipsed around this party carrying her half empty glass of champagne like she’s drunk.

Clarke is not drunk. She is stone-cold sober and pissed yet wears a smile better than any spy he’s trained with. Bellamy expected a disgruntled former insider, a pudgy man of means who wants more than the share he’s been dealt. Not this. Not her.

“Are we understood?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Though he must admit he’s impressed by her, the arrogant tone of her voice rubs him the wrong way. It wasn’t his job to stop the bombing. Just to inform. That’s all that’s in his power to do. The accusation makes his blood boil, made even worse by the fact that it’s been made by her, someone who profits off this war because of which monster she chose to marry.

“It was not my call to make,” he says. Though he tries to stay composed, there’s a bite at the end of it. And frankly, he’s glad that happened. Now that he knows who she is, he can stop pretending with her. He can be pissed. There’s finally someone he can be honest and angry with.

“Then do what you do best, and pass the message to your employer,” she replies sweetly.

Clarke has barely strung ten sentences in conversation with him since they first met, and somehow, she manages to lodge a knife into his chest with this one. She has him pegged perfectly, and he hates her for it. He’s just a messenger boy who is helpless to do anything but collect and share information. He doesn’t make the important decisions. Lives can be lost or saved because of the work he does, but only if those higher up decide to do something with the information he gives.

“I shall take that under advisement, Mrs. Wallace,” he mutters through gritted teeth. Bellamy dips her, and right as he pulls her up, he whispers, “And you get back to your important work of whoring yourself out to the very people who orchestrated the bombing you’re so angry about.”

He thinks he’s landed a sizeable blow, but without missing a beat, she sweetly says, “If I’m a whore, then what does that make you?”

Shooting him right in the chest would have hurt less.

The song ends, and her heel stomps down hard on his foot before she skips off toward her husband. Her question echoes in his head as he walks back to Roan. What does that make Bellamy? After all, he wears the expensive clothes just like she does. They both suck up in the same circles. He’s definitely taken a person or two to bed just to get information. Maybe he hates Clarke because she’s a perfect mirror. If she’s whoring herself out, then so is Bellamy.

He spends the rest of the evening watching her. Covertly, of course. If anyone caught him, he would look like all the other men drawn to her low neckline or pretty face. He watches her dance happily with her husband, who really looks smitten with her. She appears to love him too, though now that Bellamy knows she’s betraying him, he can cross off love as a motive for why she would marry this man.

When they’re not dancing, she sticks quite literally to his side. She plays up being drunk and needing his support to stay standing, all while Lightbourne’s generals discuss something that looks important with her husband.

She’s brilliant. No one would ever suspect her of giving information to their enemies. Bellamy thinks back to previous dinners when she would ask some of the most foolish questions to the engineers at the table, questions that made Bellamy cringe in embarrassment for her because how could she know so little about guns? And later, he would find those same engineers explaining complicated concepts to her blank, confused face. Probably trying to impress her and assuming it’s harmless since there’s no way she would ever understand them. All the while, she’s listening and recording all of it for Bellamy and Kane.

The more he thinks about it, the more impressed he becomes with her. Every night, they have guests over for dinner, meaning every night Clarke learns something because no one thinks she understands what they’re saying. Just like Bellamy, no one would suspect the pretty girl who married Cage Wallace to think about anything other than planning parties and the pretty dresses she wears.

The question of why she does it bothers him, though. All night, it’s all the thinks about. Even after he goes through the notes she gave him, her motive haunts him enough that he cannot fall asleep.

Why would a woman who could have anything she wants risk throwing it away by helping a network of Arkadian spies?

What could have possibly pushed her to do this?

What does she get out of it?


	3. Chapter 3

Bellamy starts to piece together his answers a little more than a month later. It happens two dinner parties after their confrontation. During the last, Clarke and Bellamy did not speak other than during their greeting at the beginning, and he found that he could relax at these parties now that he knows who his mysterious informant is. Tonight, he tries to relax as well, but it seems that him and everyone else in attendance is thrown off by the presence of Josephine Lightbourne, daughter of Russell Lightbourne.

Her engagement to Gabriel Santiago has been called off, and Bellamy knows from his sources it’s because Gabriel has been working with Polis for years. He fled before Russell Lightbourne could execute him for it, a feat very few have accomplished. But that isn’t knowledge anyone at the party seems to know. To them, it’s just a scandal. Josephine Lightbourne, daughter of the most powerful man in Sanctum, has called off her gaudy wedding and is back on the market.

Josephine traipses through the party, talking to whomever she likes and seems to enjoy the attention she receives from men, married or not. Bellamy assumes that his lack of importance would make him invisible to her, but Miss Lightbourne finds him anyway. They make small talk, and Bellamy is careful not to say anything too interesting. He doesn’t want Josephine to remember him. Frankly, he doesn’t want anyone to remember him, except to invite him to parties like these. The last thing he needs is to be on one of the Lightbourne’s radar.

He spots Cage and Clarke whispering across the room. Not an uncommon sight, and Bellamy has been studying them each chance he gets now that he knows who Clarke is and wants to know what she is up to. But it’s not the sweet whispering he’s seen between the two of them before. Aggression flows through Cage, though Bellamy cannot pinpoint his source of anger. Surely, it can’t be Clarke. She never does anything wrong. Cage’s body is rigid, and he grips her arm so tight it will surely bruise. Her husband glances around the room and then yanks her toward the hallway by the arm.

Her worried eyes accidentally meet Bellamy’s and harden in a warning just as quickly. It’s as if she’s whispering _don’t_ right into his ear. He knows she isn’t actually a spy. Clarke has received no formal training, after all. But the way she seals away her panic to give Bellamy a warning glance screams otherwise.

“Her father’s a traitor, you know,” Josephine says, and Bellamy snaps his head in her direction before Cage notices him staring at Clarke. As Josephine’s statement finally registers, Bellamy flexes his clenched hand. He hadn’t even realized he had a physical reaction to what he is seeing.

Josephine grins, pleased that she’s earned back Bellamy’s attention. Leaning forward, she whispers, “When the army advanced on Alpha Station, he refused to pledge his allegiance.”

Alpha Station. One of the border towns. If he remembers correctly, those people leaned more toward Polis than Sanctum, though they would rather live independently of both. No such luxury could be allowed in a time of war, though. Sanctum took it easily, and anyone who would not pledge their loyalty to Russell Lightbourne was lined up in the main square and shot… Clarke’s father included, apparently.

That must be why she’s betraying her husband now. Lightbourne took her home and killed her father.

It still doesn’t answer what she gets out of it unless all she wants is revenge. But she doesn’t strike him as the type. Clarke is far too clever to be caught up in such a vengeful mindset. There must be something else she wants as well. But what?

“Did her husband know that when he married her?”

“Probably,” she laughs. “But he wasn’t looking too hard at her past when he was too busy looking at her… well, you know.”

The pettiness in her voice tells him that Josephine doesn’t simply dislike Clarke. She hates her. It’s a petty, jealous sort of hate. After all, Josephine didn’t care that Bellamy was disinterested until he seemed to be interested in Clarke instead. Now, she’s spewing out whatever gossip she can think of to turn his opinion against her.

Bellamy glances back at the hallway before he can stop himself, and Josephine steps closer and says, “I hear that the reason they got married so quickly is because they thought she might be pregnant.”

While it proves the theory that she would spill information just for the attention, it also proves that she isn’t a reliable source. It’s a salacious lie, one that would probably be gobbled up by some of the more gullible guests at this party. But Bellamy Blake lies for a living. He knows a lie when he hears it.

Still. As long as he can tell her lies from her truths, Josephine Lightbourne could be a good source of information. So, he lets her think she’s won him over by asking for more details. She plays it coy, murmuring that she shouldn’t have said anything. But she clearly loves having his undivided attention.

Now that she has no one to compete with, Josephine grows bored with him and moves on to someone else. Cage returns to his party with no Clarke on his arm. Minutes pass, and right when Bellamy feels his fist clenching again, Clarke emerges as if nothing happened.

Their eyes meet again, and he looks for the easy expression she has mastered. But it’s not there. She smiles, but she can’t seem to will it to reach her eyes. Then, her gaze flickers away and she throws herself into a conversation with the Count, laughing at all the right moments. Perfect, even now.

Nothing in her expression betrays anything. Nor in her husband’s. But Bellamy watches the servants, finding them to be less guarded since they seem to be invisible to all the guests. They are watching Clarke, seeming to fuss over her and hover around her whenever they can. One makes it his mission to keep Clarke’s glass full all night. Another keeps whispering things in passing to her, things that get dangerously close to affecting Clarke’s expression.

Something happened. Something no one but Clarke, Cage, and the servants who blend into the background witnessed.

He never figures out what happened after Cage pulled her away. But other gossip travels through the party, and it’s Josephine who ultimately tells Bellamy over a dance what probably made Cage so angry. A business partner he has been courting for a while now made a pass at Clarke, apparently slipping his hand too low when he pulled her in for an embrace. What is unclear is if Cage was angry because another man made a move on his wife or because his wife slapped his hand away as soon as it happened and endangered his business deal.

His gut guesses the latter. The blame on Clarke makes more sense there, though he shouldn’t put it past Cage to blame his wife for another man groping her.

She stays quiet at dinner, more often than not prompting others to speak so she doesn’t have to. When the party moves on to the ballroom, she stays firmly at her husband’s side. She dances when Cage wants to dance with her, and that’s it. The smile stays plastered on her lips, but her eyes say that she is elsewhere right now.

Bellamy makes sure to give both of the Wallace’s his thanks before he leaves, and Cage seems completely calmed down. It’s as if nothing happened. But Clarke’s eyes keep darting to her husband, sort of like how soldier’s eyes scan the horizon in front of them looking for any sign of attack.

Just as he does when passing by starving families on the street, Bellamy feels helpless. He agreed to this job because he wanted to do some good in the world, but all he does is bear witness to horrible things that he’s powerless to stop. He listens and records and lets horrible men do horrible things so that he may continue to listen and record without suspicion. This makes him a monster too. A monster who believes the ends will justify the means, who assumes the work he does here will spare more innocents in the long run, who prays he ends up being right, lest his soul be damned for all eternity.

He justifies his inaction by reminding himself that dealing with Cage Wallace right now will only make everything worse. Bellamy will get himself killed, possibly Clarke too. He can’t just grab her and make a run for the border. There is nothing he can do to protect her from him right now.

All he can do is report what Clarke finds and do what he can to ensure that Lightbourne, Wallace, and Sanctum fall. That’s the only way he can help.

For now, at least.


	4. Chapter 4

The invitations stop coming. Not just for him but for most of the regular attendees of the Wallace dinner parties. Cage has had to travel more since the war began, and the few nights spent in Mt. Weather are less about entertaining and more about strategy. Generals and munitions experts attend, but people like Bellamy and Roan are not important enough for these meetings.

He wouldn’t mind if it were just about an obnoxious party that he doesn’t like being at in the first place. But he loses his access to Clarke, which presents a rather large problem since the war is actually happening now. Each missed opportunity to hear from her means a missed opportunity to have a leg up in a battle and save his countrymen’s lives.

With the borders even stricter than before the war, messages from Kane have grown fewer. Bellamy follows protocol, sends him the coded message explaining the problem, and awaits the procedure he is supposed to follow. But it never comes. That probably means someone in the network has been found out or had to flee, which isn’t necessarily cause for alarm since they will be replaced in due time. But it means that for now, Bellamy is on his own and has to make his own decisions. And of course, the first one he decides to make might just be the most reckless.

It’s risky and he runs into a bit of trouble at a check point, but Bellamy finds himself in Sanctum’s capital. He’s not so bold as to actually stay at the hotel where Wallace owns a suite. Instead, he finds a motel on the outskirts of town. But he does linger about the hotel lobby, sitting in an armchair and reading a newspaper until he hears the clacking of heels.

He shifts his paper a bit, spotting Clarke in a frilly pink suit and followed by two valets who are carrying her shopping bags. She doesn’t spot him. Clearly, she isn’t looking for anyone who might be watching her. And why would she? He’s fairly certain the recruit he replaced never even learned who the informant was and therefore didn’t figure out that there was one place he could find her outside of the parties at her home. Though Bellamy is still angry at her for berating him over that dance, he’s glad her temper got the better of her that night if for no other reason than to reveal herself to him. If she hadn’t, Bellamy would be out of luck right now.

Clarke wants to go straight to her suite, but the clerk informs her that her husband has called. While she goes to return the call, Bellamy slips out of the lobby and follows the valets that carry her shopping bags up to her suite. They’re too busy complaining about some guest on the second floor to notice Bellamy trailing them up the stairs. Once they’re on the top floor, Bellamy pats his pockets as if looking for a key, all while taking note of the door the two of them go into. When it shuts, he runs down to it and hides right behind the door when it opens again and they walk back into the hallway. The two valets are still chatting about having to go out for cigarettes in the middle of the night last night as Bellamy catches the door and slips inside.

The suite is large. The living room alone is bigger than his entire apartment. But there is nothing particularly special about the space. It’s not ornate like their home. It looks like a hotel suite. Sure, it’s nice enough for someone like Clarke to visit, but he can’t imagine her husband stomaching such a simple abode even for a short visit.

Bellamy ducks into a linen closet just outside the master bedroom, and not even a minute later, he hears keys jangling outside the door and voices. One belongs to Clarke, the other belongs to man he isn’t familiar with.

“—positively dreary,” Clarke groans as the door opens. “I’ve missed being out in the sunshine.”

“You’re in luck. It’s been raining all week. Reese has been going mad being cooped up in the flat all day.”

The two of them go back and forth talking about this Reese girl, and though he listens, it’s clear this conversation is not going to yield any information Arkadia will care about. It sounds like Reese is this man’s young daughter with a few health problems, and apparently Clarke knows all about her.

There’s a long, quiet pause, and before he can begin to guess at what is happening, he hears Clarke say, “Please.”

“Mrs. Wallace, this is too much.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I cannot accept this.”

“Yes, you can,” Clarke insists. “For Reese, then.”

The man must accept the obscene tip because next he hears their goodbyes and the door shut behind them. Her heels clatter on the ground after she pulls them off her feet, and she lets out a relieved groan as her bare feet pad through the suite.

Quietly, he pushes the door of the closet open. Clarke’s back is turned to him as she rifles through her black handbag. A pen is pulled out only to be dropped as soon as Clarke twirls around and sees Bellamy.

Miraculously, she doesn’t scream. Her eyes go wide, but she steadies herself enough that she doesn’t make an alarmed sound that would send hotel staff running to her aid. Shock transforms into confusion before finally settling on anger, which after their last confrontation, Bellamy should have been prepared for.

“You,” she whispers. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Hello to you too,” he sighs, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“You broke into my suite!”

“Quite easily too,” Bellamy admits, and that only makes her face turn red. “Not the security I was expecting in a hotel that has guests of your… status.”

Without her heels on, Clarke is much shorter than him. But the height difference doesn’t make her any less intimidating as she stomps toward him and jabs her finger into his chest. He’s rather glad their last confrontation happened over a dance, because based on what he’s seeing now, this girl would have no qualms about decking him.

“You know, I actually got it into my head that I owed you an apology for our last conversation, but now that you have broken into—”

Bellamy catches her hand before she can jab him again and teases, “An apology would be nice.” Her hand slips from his grip, and his sarcasm is met with a surprisingly forceful shove. “Alright,” he groans. “I realize this isn’t ideal, but how else am I supposed to communicate with you?”

Her brows are still knitted in frustration, but the rest of her body relaxes as she processes his intent. Though Clarke is clearly still angry that he startled her, she seems to understand the necessity of it. Despite all her faults, she is at least rational. He has to give her that much.

With a sigh, she mutters, “Wait right here.” Bellamy makes himself comfortable on a loveseat while Clarke pads toward her bedroom. When she comes back out, she’s armed with a pencil and notepad. “I didn’t bring anything with me,” she explains. He’s about to ask what she’s doing when she plops down across from him and begins scribbling something down with her left hand. The diamond on her finger flashes with each movement. He wonders how she can even lift her hand with a ring that size.

Bellamy doesn’t disrupt her since it’s clear she’s working from memory. Her hand glides across the page quickly as if she’s afraid she might forget something if she slows down for even a moment. Graphite smears into her silly pink jacket sleeve, and without taking her eyes off the paper in front of her, Clarke strips it off and pushes the sleeve of her white blouse up so she can get back to work. A yellowing bruise stands prominently on her forearm, almost glowing brighter after a day of being hidden under Clarke’s long sleeves.

Outwardly, he doesn’t react. Years of training broke that out of him. But the sight makes something in his chest contract.

He shouldn’t be surprised, and on a purely clinical level, he isn’t. Especially not after the last party. Her husband would be the type to lash out at his wife. Powerful and possessive, dragging her out as another bejeweled piece of his property to show off to his friends and enemies alike. And at a time like this where Cage Wallace is being jerked around by more powerful people like Lightbourne, taking his rage out on his wife might be the only way he can still feel big and strong.

But Clarke doesn’t carry herself like an abused wife. He’s watched her manipulate the guests around her, sometimes even her husband, far bolder than any spy would ever dare. Such confidence isn’t something he typically sees in women whose husbands hurt them, so the suspicion he should have had never quite processed. At least, it hadn’t until he watched the two of them at that party.

Suspecting it and seeing the bruise are two very different things, though.

“I don’t know if your people actually have Santiago,” she mumbles, oblivious to him staring at the bruise on her arm, “but this is where Lightbourne’s generals suspect he might be hiding.” She tears off a page and slides him a list of locations in Polis. Without even stopping for a breath, she continues onto the next page. Not writing anymore but drawing.

The pencil between her fingers only stops moving when Clarke scrunches her eyes shut to try to remember a detail. It takes a while for him to make out the gears she’s drawing, likely one of the new mechanisms that her husband’s engineers have come up with. The drawing looks familiar, though not because he’s seen a lot of things like it. It looks like the one she gave him earlier, the one he assumed she had stolen.

An artist, he remembers. A little factoid he tucked away when studying up on them but forgot as soon as Clarke revealed herself as his informant.

“And he’s moving money around,” she mumbles, not taking her eyes off the page. “There are rumors that his factories will be taken over by Lightbourne.” That Bellamy had suspected. The economy is in shambles and soon Lightbourne will decide to cut out the middleman and take Wallace’s munitions factories for himself to cut down on cost. “Cage is liquidating what he can and setting himself up just in case.”

Bellamy’s eyes drift to the shopping bags still sitting on the marble floor. Cage must not be that concerned about money if he is still sending his wife off to spend it all on dressy shoes and expensive perfumes.

“If you are going to judge me, at least do it out loud,” she mutters. When he looks back at her, she’s put her pencil down and is staring at him with a raised eyebrow. “Well?”

Saying what is really on his mind seems cruel. Like kicking someone while they’re down. But she taps that pencil impatiently while she waits, and before he can stop himself, he blurts out, “You seem awfully comfortable throwing money around while half your country starves.”

“Who says I’m comfortable with it?” With a sigh, Bellamy leans forward and gestures for her to hand over the paper. She pulls it out of his reach and asks, “What is your name?”

“You know I won’t answer that.”

“Who could I possibly tell?”

The question startles him. Who could she tell? No one, not if she wants to keep her life. Telling anyone about Bellamy would reveal that she has been working with him, and then, she is done too. And even if she works out a way to convince her husband that she just stumbled onto a spy, Bellamy could always implicate her in retaliation. The two of them can never betray each other, even if they want to. It’s the closest thing to trust Bellamy has had since taking this job.

“Answer one question and I’ll tell you,” he offers. A smile tugs at her lips and she relaxes into the couch across from him. “What do you get out of this?”

“What do you think?”

His eyes drift back to her bruised arm, though she has pulled the sleeve down to cover it now, and the answer is so painfully obvious.

“You want us to get you out,” he realizes. If that has been her intent all along, that means she’s been trying to get away from her husband for more than a year. This has been going on for their entire marriage… maybe longer. Bellamy thinks back on everything he knows about their courtship. Clarke still lived in Alpha Station, but only with her mother since her father had been executed years earlier. Cage was in town scoping out land for a factory and stumbled upon her somehow. Love at first sight, the society pages claimed. But Clarke isn’t the kind of girl to fall for a rich man who takes her to fancy dinners and buys her expensive presents. She’s smart, and after watching her father die, she had to learn how to survive.

It’s like he’s seeing her for the first time. Not quite the privileged brat he wanted to write her off as. No, she’s someone who knew it was safer to go along with a dangerous man than to reject him. No wasn’t an option for her. Only yes.

Every horrible thing he has said to her or thought about her comes flooding back, and he hates himself for each one. It’s the job, he knows. It cuts out empathy and forces him to make quick judgements about each mark. But it makes him feel like a monster.

“Now, what is your name?”

“Blake.”

“Blake?” Her head cocks to the side and her eyes narrow at him, as if wondering if the name is real or another alias. He probably could have given her another alias, but why bother? She can’t tell a soul.

“Bellamy Blake,” he sighs. The name feels foreign on his tongue. Lovejoy has been the face he’s worn so long that Bellamy Blake feels like a mask.

“Bellamy,” Clarke says, trying it out. Something warm flips in his chest as he hears his name for the first time in months. It’s a strange sensation, one he shouldn’t get used to. He’ll probably go the rest of the war without hearing his name again unless he gets caught. But it’s still nice to hear it. And her voice is soft and gentle, making his name roll off her tongue like honey. “Now, have you eaten?”

“I’ve been too busy waiting on you because you took your sweet time picking out scarves,” Bellamy groans, and instead of giving him an eye roll, Clarke laughs. Not those high-pitched giggles he’s heard at her parties, but a low, unexpected, and extremely unladylike laugh.

Clarke orders her dinner from the kitchen downstairs, and Bellamy ducks into the master bedroom when it’s delivered. She banters with the kitchen boys who bring her food as if they’re friends, and maybe they are. These trips are the only time Clarke is allowed out of her husband’s line of sight, maybe the only time she can be even a little bit like herself. Like with the man earlier, both boys protest about the size of the tip, but it seems like this is a conversation they’ve had with Clarke before by how easily they give in. Bellamy adds generous to the list of things he knows about Clarke.

Smart. Artistic. Generous.

A good liar. And stubborn, of course. With a bit of a temper. An arrogance about her that drives him mad.

Abused. Trapped. Scared, maybe. Though she betrays no sign of it.

Dinner consists of pasta and salad that they split in half. Nothing too fancy like the meals he has had at her home. It seems her indulgences really are only for show. She doesn’t even bother with wine.

The two of them talk very little, only sharing the most basic information about the war. Bellamy can’t tell her all he knows, so they only cover what is in the newspapers. When he’s done eating, he hides the information she’s given him in his coat.

“I did mean to apologize, though,” she tells him as he puts it on.

“For what? Keeping me waiting?” he jokes.

“For getting angry with you over Tondc,” Clarke whispers. She’s not looking at him, instead playing with the fork on her almost empty plate. “I got it into my head that it would be stopped and then had to sit in a room full of cheering drunks as news of the bombing came on the radio.” Bellamy can see it perfectly. Clarke in a room of Cage’s friends, mentally preparing herself to console them over a failed mission, only to be shocked at the news that despite having warning, no one stopped it. Champagne bottles popping open, her husband kissing her victoriously, all while Clarke probably wanted to cry over all those innocent deaths. Bellamy experienced something similar. “I know you did what you could. Just like I did. Anyway, I am sorry, Bellamy.”

He sits back down as he tries to come up with something to say in response. On some level, he has understood all of that. Bellamy wanted to lash out too when the news of the bombing came out, but he had no outlet. No friends. No one who knows who he is. No one who harbors the same political feelings as him. And Clarke didn’t either. All she had was him, and in a moment of weakness, she snapped. And so did he, now that he thinks about it.

Knowing what he does now makes what he said to her even more despicable.

“I should apologize for what I said as well,” Bellamy says. “It was unfair and cruel and—”

“True,” she cuts him off. “You were not wrong.”

“Clarke,” Bellamy pleads. “Who we are and who we have to be to survive are very different things.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to that and instead busies herself with stacking the plates back onto the tray. He watches her and thinks over the list of words he has to describe woman sitting across from him. The word _friend_ hovers near the other words. She’s an ally at minimum. But she could be a friend. His only friend here. There is no one else who knows his name. No one else who wants Sanctum to lose the war. No one else who wants to cry for the dead in Tondc. Clarke is all he has here.

After a few minutes of awkward silence, Bellamy stands to leave. “If I do not receive an invitation in the next month, expect to run into me like this again.”

“I appreciate the warning,” she laughs. Bellamy rolls his eyes despite laughing too and then leaves.

Bellamy slips out of the hotel unnoticed. There are more officers on the streets here than in Mt. Weather, but they pay no mind to people who dress as well as Bellamy. He might as well be invisible to them. Invisible to everyone, really. To everyone but Clarke, his friend.


	5. Chapter 5

He goes to the hotel the next month. Clarke is prepared for that visit, and the two of them spend half an hour going over what she’s found. He likes it better this way, despite the increased risk of these visits, if only because he actually gets an explanation of what he is putting in his designated drop spot each month. Bellamy can usually figure it out on his own, but it’s a quicker process to hear it right from Clarke’s mouth.

Bellamy lingers longer this time, and the two of them talk for hours after dinner. Mostly about the war again, though Clarke does fill him in on the gossip and has him laughing so hard that he has to muffle his laughter into his sleeve so no one overhears.

He’s disappointed when he receives an invitation to another party a week later. No excuse to sneak off to the capital and see Clarke. Sure, he will see her at the party, but he won’t really be him and she won’t really be her. The masks go back on. Gone are Bellamy and Clarke. Only Mr. Lovejoy and Mrs. Wallace.

Unlike the other parties, this one is not hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Wallace. Cage is currently with Lightbourne near the front arguing over pricing. It’s at Count Desai’s home instead. It’s not uncommon, apparently. But no one of rank has ever bothered to invite Bellamy. No one except Cage Wallace, who wants to keep his business partners happy. He has a feeling that Roan is the only reason Bellamy is invited this time, but he will take it.

Ryker, the young Count, doesn’t bother to greet Bellamy when he arrives. Though Bellamy has never spoken with him, he’s gathered from Clarke that he is one of those low-ranking nobles who agonizes over his status as if he loathes it. Bellamy can’t empathize with his predicament. He’s lucky to be alive since so many like him have fled the country or have been killed outright over the last decade. But he seems to wish he was dead.

The party has a very different energy from the others. At the Wallace’s home, everyone is jockeying for time with Cage. But here, no one seems to be jockeying for anything. Certainly not a conversation with the sullen host who lurks in the corners and only speaks with his mother.

Clarke arrives unaccompanied and wearing a far more conservative gown than she does at her own parties. It’s dark blue, making her pale skin shine brighter even in the dimly lit room. And unlike at other gatherings, she melts into the background and takes up conversation with a few of the other wives. Both are conscious choices not to be noticed, and he can’t help but wonder if her husband not being here has something to do with that.

Bellamy is seated next to an officer at dinner, a mistake that would not have happened at a Wallace party. There is no real rhyme or reason to the seating chart. Josephine is seated with a doctor named Cillian and a diplomat who doesn’t say a word all evening, and she is clearly furious about it. Meanwhile, Bellamy is surrounded by all sorts of important, interesting people, learning more about Sanctum’s problems with their torpedo design than he has in months of actively trying to uncover them. Clarke is seated beside Ryker’s mother, an honor that should have been reserved for Lightbourne’s daughter, not the wife of a munitions dealer. The old money in the room is put off by the seating arrangement, and he couldn’t be more amused by it. And based on Clarke’s tiny grin when Josephine starts to get irritated, he’d say he isn’t alone in that amusement.

He can’t help but steal glances at her. She looks more like herself than she ever does at her own parties, able to relax and engage in as much or as little conversation as she wants. Clarke looks more like the woman he spoke to in the capital here. Less heavy makeup, a simple dress she actually picked out for herself, and not being forced to flit about the room charming all of Cage’s potential business partners.

Clarke looks happy, he realizes. Is this what it will be like for her when Kane finally breaks her out of here? She could be free and happy in Arkadia. Maybe pursue her art that she loves more than anything.

After dinner, there is dancing in the ballroom… because there always seems to be dancing at these events. Bellamy can’t stand it. After Ryker rejects her, Josephine drags Bellamy out for two songs and chatters on and on about how bland her food was and how cheap the wine they’re serving is. It hasn’t been a good night for Miss Lightbourne. She was insulted by her seating, and on top of it, she and Clarke accidentally wore the same exact shade of dark blue, which she has no problem telling Bellamy that she looks better in, of course.

During their second dance, Bellamy spots the doctor, Cillian, bringing Clarke out to the dancefloor. He must make a joke because Clarke laughs… really laughs. Not those silly giggles she that she forces out for her husband’s guests. A real laugh, one Bellamy has only heard when he is alone with her back in that suite. Normally, his chest warms at the sound, but tonight, it’s tightening.

Another man cuts in to dance with Josephine, which is perfectly fine with him. Bellamy settles himself off to the side and falls into an easy conversation with a few other employees of Roan’s. Though he tries not to pay attention, he counts three dances that Clarke has with Cillian. The man holds her a little too close for comfort… not the way someone should ever dance with someone else’s wife. Clarke is the one to pull away, though not without protest from him.

“Are you alright?” Roan asks, clapping his hand on Bellamy’s shoulder. After a beat, he realized that he’s gripping his glass so hard that he might shatter it on accident.

“Yes, sorry. Just lost in thought,” Bellamy replies. He falls back into conversation with the others, and when he looks for Clarke, she’s gone. Possibly to drop her messages into his coat before she leaves. He waits for her to come back, maybe to steal a dance since her husband isn’t here and have one real conversation tonight, but minute after minute passes, and still nothing.

He decides to go check his coat, figuring that if he has what he came here for, he could just leave. Bellamy gets stopped in the hallway a few times, once to give a drunk man directions back to the ballroom, another to help the Count’s mother find where she left her glove, and once by a servant who thinks Bellamy is lost.

The door of the coat room is cracked open, which registers as odd until he spots two figures in a tight embrace in the corner of the room. He recognizes the slicked-back, dark hair as Cillian’s, which doesn’t surprise Bellamy in the slightest. It takes a lot to shock a spy, after all.

It’s the blonde curls his long fingers weave through that sends a pang through Bellamy’s chest.

Bellamy stands there, frozen, watching Clarke kiss this man she met just earlier this evening. Every coherent thought going through his mind tells him he must be seeing things. Clarke wouldn’t be so reckless. If her husband ever found out, he would kill her for this. Why would she throw everything she’s worked for away for a brief fling with a man she barely knows?

Bellamy doesn’t want to judge her. After all, he could understand why she would consider having an affair. She must miss feeling like someone, anyone, loves her. But not like this. Not with a man she doesn’t know and can’t trust. Surely, there must be a smarter option. Someone careful who would never put her at risk with her husband by flirting with her as publicly as he did on the dancefloor. Someone who actually cares about her. Someone she can trust, someone like—

When he finishes that thought, he’s so startled that his hand slips on the handle.

_Someone like Bellamy_.

The noise his hand slipping makes is enough to break apart the couple, but it’s not Clarke who gapes at him with panicked eyes, but Josephine.

It’s uncanny how identical the two of them appear from behind. With both of them wearing dark blue dresses, it’s so easy to see Clarke when it’s really Josephine.

“Apologies,” Bellamy stutters out before ducking back out of the coat room. His long legs stride away as quickly as they can manage, but they’re no match for a red-faced Josephine chasing after him and grabbing his arm. “I saw nothing,” he swears when she pushes him back against the wall. A corner of a gilded frame digs into his back.

“Nothing?” she repeats back. When he nods, she lets go and looks him up and down. “How can I trust you?”

It takes everything in him not to laugh. He is the last person anyone here should trust, and yet they all seem to. Well, all but her. Bellamy flips through the list of things he knows about Josephine. Vain. Petty. Attention-starved. And that’s enough information to get him out of this mess.

“I would never say anything to hurt your reputation,” he whispers. “Though, I have to admit, I didn’t like seeing that one bit.” Curiosity gets the better of her and she raises her eyebrows. “I just thought you and I had more of a connection than you and that doctor.”

A smile tugs at her lips, and her eyelashes bat at him. Flirting. That’s all he has to do to keep Josephine appeased. So painfully simple that it feels like cheating.

“You never said anything,” Josephine grins as one of her fingers reaches up to twirl her golden hair.

“I’m a bit shy,” he lies, and she giggles and pushes his shoulder playfully. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement. At first, he suspects it is Cillian, but he darted out of the coat room right after Josephine. Bellamy shouldn’t risk breaking eye contact with Josephine, not while he’s almost in the clear with her, but the flash of blonde in the corner of his vision jerks his eyes off her long enough for him to see Clarke glancing between Bellamy and Josephine. Brows furrowed and lips parted, he can see her struggling to decipher what he is doing. And just as quickly, she disappears into the coat room to deliver the messages for Bellamy.

“You don’t strike me as shy,” Josephine says, and he snaps his gaze back to her before it looks suspicious.

“Beautiful women make me shy.” Their conversation is interrupted when Roan walks purposefully toward them. Josephine, still blushing, breaks from him and heads back toward the ballroom. “Everything alright?” he asks.

“Eden is under attack,” Roan whispers. The music from the ballroom can no longer be heard, which means the musicians must have stopped playing when the news broke throughout the party. Eden isn’t large like Mt. Weather or the capital, but it’s still a city with a large population and booming industry. Roan has a factory there, as does Cage Wallace.

“What?” Bellamy snaps, faking outrage. “I thought it was secure.”

“As did I,” he hisses. Though his outrage has less to do with moral feelings about the war and everything to do with how much money he will lose if his factory goes up in smoke.

“Is it a bombing?” It’s a stupid question, and he knows it. Of course, it’s a bombing, but he does what he can to downplay his strategic knowledge whenever he can.

“A bad one,” Roan groans. Even if Sanctum manages to shoot those planes out of the sky, there’s no safe place for them to fall. Half of Eden will burn down from the planes crashing alone.

Bellamy should be happy about this news, and on one level, he is. He is happy that Polis seems to have the upper hand for once.

But Bellamy knows that the evil men who drive this war won’t get hurt in the Eden bombing. It’s the families that will be killed. Men putting in extra shifts so they can put food on the table. The poor people who won’t be evacuated to safety quickly enough.

The two of them return to the ballroom together, and his few coworkers that came tonight flock them with questions about the status of their factory. Around the ballroom, everyone else is in clusters as well. He scans the room for Clarke, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

While Roan is busy, Bellamy heads back to where he last saw her: the coat room. But when he looks inside, he sees the hanger labeled with her name is empty… meaning she took her coat and left.

It couldn’t have been the bombing that made her want to leave. She disappeared before that news broke. So, why did she leave?


	6. Chapter 6

Bellamy hates how much time he spends thinking of her. It’s a distraction while he works, both his official and unofficial work. He can’t afford it right now, not while Roan has doubled his workload and Murphy didn’t show up at their last agreed upon meeting spot. Bellamy has had no contact with Kane in months. No contact with anyone from his old life, actually. Not with the borders getting tighter by the day and a spy or two probably blowing their own covers and getting themselves killed.

And with all this hell raining down upon him, what is he thinking about? Her. Clarke. Was she actually being cold during the two parties since the one at the Count’s home or was she acting like she normally does? What did that look mean? And why did he feel jealous when he thought it was her in Cillian’s arms?

He can’t answer the first two, and he avoids answering the last one. He shouldn’t warrant that question with an answer. Didn’t he learn his lesson with Echo? Don’t get attached. One of the first things spies are trained on, and he’s failed at it not once but twice now. At least Echo didn’t have a husband. Well, that he knows of.

Bellamy hasn’t fallen for Clarke. He’s just lonely, of course. She’s the only person he can have a real conversation with, so his mind is tricking him into thinking something is there when it isn’t. Clarke is his friend. And until Kane or Murphy reaches out, the only contact Bellamy has. So, the lurching in his chest when he sees her husband wrap his arm around her or kiss her is just a protective instinct, nothing more.

He tells himself that as many times as he can, trying to make it stick. But when Clarke’s eyes meet his across the room, his mind doesn’t jump to reminding himself that he’s just lonely. He thinks, _not yet,_ like a star-crossed lover would, picturing a future where she’s safe from her husband and ready to fall into his arms instead. His heart stutters upon thinking those two maddening words before logic can step in.

The morning of the next party at Cage’s home, Bellamy is trying to get his mind off Clarke while he scans through the newspaper. There were several executions at the capital yesterday. Mostly dissenters from what he can tell, but he sees Monty’s Sanctum identity on the list of those killed. One more spy dead. A friend he’ll never see again. At least he and Harper are together now.

He gives himself a moment to grieve. It’s not often that he gets news like this without a witness.

When he turns back to the paper, another name catches his attention: Abigail Griffin.

Clarke never speaks of her parents. All he knows is from Josephine gossiping about her father and from Clarke’s wedding announcement saying she is the daughter of Jacob and Abigail Griffin.

Is she going to find out about her mother’s death by reading the newspaper? Or will her husband tell her? Or did she find out about it before it happened?

Bellamy expects to get word that the dinner party is cancelled in light of this news, but it never comes. As he gets his tux on, he feels stupid for thinking it would be cancelled. Both her parents have been executed for treason. Lightbourne would deal with Clarke too if there is any suspicion that she shares similar sentiments. She has to go on like it means nothing to her. She has to denounce them just to stay alive. Her husband will flaunt her in front of his friends just as he does at every party, and the two of them will kill any rumors about Clarke being a traitor too. Because how could the beautiful Clarke Wallace who is the most welcoming and kind host be a traitor to Sanctum?

Before his car comes, Bellamy scribbles down a few words of condolences for her and tucks the paper into the slit in his sleeve. It might be the only condolences she gets.

He sees her right away when he arrives. Cage drags her by her wrist to come greet him, his grip too hard around her wrist. And though she gives the performance of a lifetime, Bellamy’s heart breaks at just the sight of her smile. The desire to throw away protocol and take her as far away from here as he can manage is too strong.

Bellamy watches her all night. She never slips up. Not once.

Clarke links arms with Josephine as they walk to the dining room, both giggling like schoolgirls even though Clarke must want Josephine’s father dead for this. She toasts to Lightbourne’s good health at dinner. She dances with everyone who asks, and everyone seems to ask. All with a beautiful, devastating smile on her lips.

The only time she wavers is at the end of the night. Bellamy goes to thank her for a lovely evening, and when he moves to kiss her hand, he feels it shaking in his. Bellamy gives it a subtle squeeze, something no one would notice but her, and kisses it. It’s not enough, but it’s all he can give her tonight.

A week later, he finds himself hiding in her hotel suite before she arrives. Bellamy has no reason to be here. He got his information at the party. She will have nothing new for him… certainly not in her state. And yet, he’s here. And there can be no lying to himself anymore about why that is.

He holds his breath as the door to her suite opens. Her voice sounds like rain after a long drought as she speaks with the valets. Then, as soon as the doors click shut behind her, she cries. Not a sniffle, but a loud, broken sound that rattles every bone in his body.

Between shallow breaths, she whispers, “I know you’re here.”

Bellamy left no clue for her to find. There is no way to deduct that from evidence alone. But it’s said with certainty. Just as Bellamy knew he couldn’t stay away, Clarke seemed to know that he would come for her.

He slips out to where she can see him, and her tearful expression pierces him faster than any bullet ever could. Bellamy isn’t sure which one of them moves. Maybe both of them. But somehow, they collide. His arms wrap tight around her, holding her for the first time ever. Her fingers cling to his jacket as if scared to let go, and she sobs into his chest.

They stay like that long enough for the skies to grow dark outside. Bellamy threads his fingers through her hair, marveling at how soft it is against his fingertips. Her body heat is almost suffocating after so many months with limited physical contact, but he dreads the second she will pull away.

“I’ve asked about getting you out,” he tells her as the tears begin to slow. “Communication has been difficult, but it will get through.”

“I’m not getting out,” Clarke murmurs. Slowly, she lifts her head from his chest and looks up at him. “They would have gotten me out by now if they were going to honor their deal.”

“That’s not—”

“Bellamy, what motivation could they possibly have to get me out of Sanctum with the kinds of information I’m able to give them while I’m here?”

Her words wash through his body like shattered glass. Clarke is right. Echo always warned Bellamy that if it wasn’t convenient, no one would bother to rescue him if he finds himself trapped behind enemy lines. Why would that be any different for Clarke who, for all intents and purposes, is just another spy? And a high profile one at that. Other assets would be easier to retrieve, but she’s walled up in a fortress inside Mt. Weather. And as long as she’s walled up there and Bellamy can get in every now and then, she’s more valuable to the war effort here than in Arkadia. They aren’t coming for Clarke.

“I’ll get you out,” he tells her. She shakes her head in disbelief and pulls away. Maybe she’s right to dismiss him. Bellamy doesn’t have the first clue how to get her out of the country undetected.

She dabs her watery eyes with her palm and murmurs, “I’ll call for dinner.” She extricates herself from him, looking as though she wants to apologize for crying on him, and it takes everything in him not to pull her back. The emptiness that has made him so numb all these months disappeared while he had her close, and as soon as she’s out of reach, he feels the emptiness return, but this time without the numbness that made it bearable.

While he is hiding in her room during food delivery, he mulls over possible escape routes. The most obvious opportunity is during these trips into the capital. Clarke typically sees a few acquaintances for lunch and then shops, so if he got her out during the afternoon, they would have a head start before the hotel staff notices that she hasn’t returned. But then, there’s the issue of dealing with her driver. Not to mention that they’re so far from the nearest weak spot on the border. One slip up, and Cage gets a phone call and meets them there. It would be the end of Bellamy’s life, at least. Clarke might survive it, though he imagines the home she would return to might make her wish she hadn’t.

That leaves Mt. Weather, the far more ideal starting point for their daring escape given its proximity to the Eligius border. Clarke never leaves that home without her husband. That party at the Count’s was a one-time opportunity, it seems. So, Bellamy has to come up with a way to break Clarke out of her own home.

During dinner, he and Clarke do not speak. She’s lost in her own tormented thoughts and he’s running through scenarios. Bellamy has a few ideas of how he could get her out, but he will need to study the layout better next time he attends an event there.

“Thank you for coming,” she whispers. Clarke nudges her half-eaten plate toward him, and with a sigh, he drags the remaining food to his own and begins eating. It feels intimate and oddly familiar, like watching his father finish his mother’s chicken when she swore she couldn’t eat another bite. He has a lot of moments like this with Clarke. It’s hard to believe the woman who is friends with what remains of the royalty in Sanctum and wears jewels that would make a Queen envious is the same one who steals potatoes off his plate and walks around barefoot in his presence. She must feel comfortable with him. Safe, even. At least, he hopes she does.

“Well, I was worried,” he admits. The corners of her mouth turn up a bit. It’s the closest thing he’s seen to a real smile from her in a while. “I am very sorry about what happened to her. I lost my mother a few years back, and though it was nothing like this, I do understand some of what you’re feeling.”

Clarke blinks a few times, and it hits him that he’s never actually shared anything about his life before. Nothing but his name. She seems to realize this too. Hesitantly, she asks, “How did she—”

“Pneumonia, ultimately,” he answers without a second thought. Not even the voice in his head that sounds oddly like Marcus Kane’s stops him from saying that. Bellamy should not have told Clarke any of that, but it’s so freeing to say something real out loud.

“I’m so sorry.”

He stares into her bright blue eyes and has to bite his tongue before all the other secrets of Bellamy Blake come stumbling out. He wants to tell her everything. Where he grew up. All about his little sister back home who thinks he’s out on the front lines. About how he wanted to be a teacher, not a spy. So many real things that he wants her to know about him but can’t tell her.

_Not yet_.


	7. Chapter 7

Bellamy should have returned home. After he slipped out of her suite last night, he was supposed to get a full night of sleep and leave early in the morning. And yet, he is still lounging in his motel bed at noon after a night of fitful sleep.

It’s not as though he has anywhere to be today or tomorrow. He could just stay another night, check on Clarke again, and leave tomorrow. But what reason does he have to stay?

No intel to be gained. Taking another risk by seeing her again. There is no purpose for him being here except that he wants to be. That in of itself is another danger. This isn’t what Mr. Lovejoy, the quiet businessman who only cares for profits, would want. It’s what Bellamy Blake wants.

Knowing that doesn’t stop him from slipping back into her suite as the maids leave her room. In the silence of his comfortable hiding spot, there’s nothing to distract him from thinking about why Bellamy Blake wants to see her.

It’s more than just concern for her wellbeing, though that is what pulled him here in the first place. It’s also selfish. With Clarke, Bellamy Blake can breathe again. In this suite, he can stop being Mr. Lovejoy, even if for just a few stolen moments. And she can be just Clarke with him. Not Mrs. Wallace. Not the perfect and beautifully made up host. Here, she lets her hair down. He sees her real smile and hears her beautiful laugh. She tells him bad jokes and has impressions of all her husband’s business partners.

It was here in this suite where he told Clarke his real name. And it was here in this suite where Clarke let him hold her while she cried. Bellamy sounds so childish as he tries to justify coming here again. What it comes down to is that he wants a few more stolen moments with her. Something real to hold onto while he wears Lovejoy’s mask.

The door swings open, and heels clack until she kicks them off. Bellamy waits for the sound of someone else’s feet, but it never comes. She must have come up alone today. He steps out, making no effort to remain quiet.

Clarke has tossed her coat onto the loveseat and is now in front of the mirror, pulling pins out of her hair. She’s so lost in thought that she doesn’t hear him approach.

“Clarke,” he says, and her head snaps in his direction.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. Half her hair is still pinned back, the rest falls into her face. She makes no effort to pull the other pins out or pin the fallen hair back. Instead, she just stares at him, her face puzzled like it was that night Bellamy had to deal with Josephine. He never did make sense of that expression.

He opens his mouth to respond, but he never prepared an answer. There isn’t even a convincing answer he can use on himself that he believes.

“Not that I do not want to see you,” Clarke says quickly. “But you, um, you normally don’t stay two days.”

Bellamy rests his shoulder against the wall, keeping five feet between them. Though she was pressed into his chest just last night, their closeness now feels far more intimate. Perhaps it’s the way her eyes look through him. It’s unnerving that anyone can with all the walls he has put up just to stay alive.

“You do not have to check up on me,” she adds.

“I want to,” he admits. Her dark eyelashes bat repeatedly as she peers up at Bellamy, and her puzzled expression softens. “It’s just… well. The next time I see you, we won’t be able to talk. Or at least, not about anything real.” She opens her mouth, but whatever she wants to say dies on her tongue. “And we don’t have to talk,” he stutters out. “If you don’t want to, I mean.”

Her eyes fall to the ground. “There is not much to talk about. My mother is dead, and I have to renounce her if I don’t want to meet the same fate.” Clarke pads into the sitting area, and he follows. Bellamy sits down beside her on the loveseat, and when she looks up at him, he realizes it’s a mistake. Distance. The two of them need more distance. He should have sat across from her. She looks off to the side and mutters, “Lightbourne will be studying me closely, so I need to just put all of it out of my mind.”

“Wait, you’re going to see him?” he asks.

“Next week. I’m not sure at which of his homes, though.” She says it so casually, like she’s meeting with someone she sees all the time.

“You’ve met him before,” he realizes. Of course, she has. Her husband is very close with Lightbourne, and Clarke is allegedly friends with his daughter, though everyone knows the two of them hate each other. “What is he like?” Clarke turns to face him, and again, he’s struck by how close the two of them are.

“Smart, charismatic, and oddly kind.” Bellamy groans. “In a sense, I mean. He’s very generous with his friends, and he throws parties that would put ours to shame. Russell remembers everything. I had to miss a party because I was sick, and he remembered to check up on me the next time he saw me,” she explains with an edge in her voice. “When you don’t experience a lot of kindness, little things like that are enough to make you forget what he is doing. At least, for a little while. Then, he bombs Tondc or executes your other parent, and you feel sick just thinking about how many times you will have to smile at that bastard.”

His hand covers hers reflexively, and Clarke presses her cheek into the green fabric of the loveseat. She doesn’t pull away, so he keeps holding her hand. It’s warm against his skin. Soft, too.

To lighten the mood, he asks, “Do you have a fancy new dress for your meeting?” A loud snort escapes her, and her cheeks redden as soon as she registers the sound she just made. Bellamy laughs quietly, and the sadness leaves her eyes as she scrunches her nose at him and pushes him slightly.

“I bought one today.”

“Would you like to show me?” he teases.

“No,” she groans, and he lets out a mock offended gasp. “You will just make fun of it!” she protests. “I know you think I look ridiculous in them.”

“Actually, you look rather beautiful in them,” he admits. The shock in her blue eyes throws him. Surely, she knows how she looks at those parties. Lately, he has spent most of the parties just trying not to look at her. “Though, I will admit they are a bit… much. I did like the one you wore to Count Desai’s party.”

“You must be confusing it with Josephine’s dress,” she murmurs as she pushes herself up to her feet. 

Clarke walks over to where she left her shopping bags on the floor, and Bellamy tries to remember what Josephine’s dress even looked like. All he remembers of it is seeing the color in the coat room, but that’s it. But he remembers Clarke’s. It’s almost laughable that she thinks he would confuse it with Josephine’s. As if he didn’t spend that entire party stealing glances at her. Well, up until she left abruptly for no reason at all.

The dress she pulls out of her shopping bag is black and white. Low neckline, but not as bold as some of the others. The jewels sewn into the fabric are almost blinding. It’s exactly the sort of thing that the people at the party would love, but Bellamy can’t stop himself from pulling a face. It’s too much.

“I knew you would hate it,” she laughs. When he opens his mouth to protest, she says, “Say one nice thing about it.” Her eyebrows are raised in a challenge.

Bellamy could lie. He’s good at lying. But Clarke is the one person he doesn’t have to lie to, and he wants to keep it that way. So, he settles for a truth. “You will look beautiful in it,” he says carefully.

Her eyes narrow at him, trying to see if he is lying. But it’s not a lie. Clarke looks beautiful in everything, even the gaudy, over the top gown she’s holding in her hand.

“Speaking of Josephine,” Bellamy says before she can push him on it, “I have some gossip that will cheer you up.” Clarke laughs as she tucks the dress back into the bag. “I walked in on Josephine and that doctor in the coat room.”

Her eyes light up as a smile tugs at her lips. “Really?” She abandons the bag and rushes back to the loveseat. “Tell me everything.”

“Well, it was dark. I could make out Cillian just fine, but for a moment, I thought it was you that was with him.”

“I would never,” she laughs, swatting his arm.

“It was dark!” he reminds her, now laughing too. “You and Josephine look very similar from behind. It was an honest mistake. Anyway, she caught me and hunted me down. You would not believe the sweet talking I had to do to get her to leave me alone.”

Clarke blinks at that, and it looks like she has a question, but she never says anything. Normally, Bellamy is good at reading people. But from the beginning, Clarke has proven that wrong. He sized her up incorrectly, and now, he can’t quite figure out what is going on in her head.

She rings for dinner, and the familiar routine makes Bellamy finally relax.

They find themselves at the table like always, sitting across from each other. The table between them makes her closeness a little less overwhelming. They make small talk. No talk of war tonight, just weather and gossip. Clarke eats more tonight, thankfully. Though she still looks sad, she doesn’t look as defeated as she did last night.

Bellamy begins talking about Roan’s stress over the late shipment when Clarke leans back in her chair and sighs. “What?” he asks.

“I thought you said you wanted to talk about something real,” Clarke says.

“I meant we could, not that we have to,” he corrects, but he knows she’s right. This is something he could talk to her about at a party. “What would you like to talk about?”

“I’m not sure. Frankly, I hardly know you,” she laughs. Clarke means it as a joke, but he realizes that it’s accurate. Bellamy knows so much about her, but she knows barely anything about him.

“What do you want to know?”

“Bellamy—”

“Ask and I’ll tell you.” She furrows her eyebrows and looks him over, as if trying to see if he’s telling the truth.

“How much of your cover is true?” Clarke asks carefully. It’s a safe question, one she knows he can answer.

“None of it.”

“None?” She sounds shocked.

“I’m a very good liar,” he sighs.

Too good. It’s a skill he picked up after his father died and his mother found herself pregnant with a married man’s baby. Bellamy was just a boy when Octavia became his secret. They moved far enough out of town so no one would discover that Aurora Blake was unmarried and pregnant, and months after Octavia was born, Bellamy fabricated the story about his aunt passing away and his little cousin Octavia having nowhere else to go. He sold the story well. No one ever found out, not even the man who got his mother pregnant.

Clarke fidgets across from him, sliding her wedding ring up and down her finger as she thinks.

“How much of your cover is true?” Bellamy asks her, and she blinks up in confusion. “Clarke Griffin and Clarke Wallace are not quite the same person, wouldn’t you agree?” The corners of her mouth turn up as she realizes what he’s asking.

“Clarke Wallace is a perfect wife whose entire life revolves around the business interests of the love of her life, Cage,” she mutters. “Clarke Griffin got it into her head that she would marry Finn Collins, move out to the countryside, and spend her days painting.”

“And who is Finn Collins?” 

“A boy I almost eloped with,” she admits, and Bellamy has to cover his mouth with his hand to hide his shock. “I was young and not all that smart.”

“What happened?”

“He was already engaged,” she shrugs. Clarke dismisses it so casually, but the hurt is still visible. “Your turn. Tell me something real.”

“Is this a game now?”

“Why not?” she teases. Bellamy taps his finger onto the table until he thinks of something to say.

“I had someone too. A fellow spy. I don’t really know much about her. I thought I did, but then I realized she hadn’t even given me her real name.”

“What happened?”

“She defected and I never saw her again.” When he looks up at Clarke, her eyes are wide with concern. No one has ever looked at him like that when he admitted what happened with Echo. He’s always met with a lecture about being careful and how bad it could be if Echo ever traded information about Bellamy’s current identity. She wouldn’t, he wants to believe. If any part of her cared about him, she wouldn’t. “Your turn.”

“I’m good with a gun.” Bellamy laughs, thinking back on all the silly questions she’s asked at the dinner parties. Her ditsy act was a little too perfect.

“So am I.”

“I already suspected that. Tell me something else.”

And he does.

The two of them go back and forth, not moving from the table. He learns all about her growing up in Alpha Station. There’s a best friend named Wells on the other side of the border, and if she ever gets out of Mt. Weather, she will probably go find him since she has nowhere else to go. Clarke draws and paints and gets sad every time she sees a beautiful sunset because she has no paintbrush to capture it with anymore. She’s kissed three men in her life: Wells but it was like kissing her brother, Finn, and Cage. She and her father were close, but she had a difficult relationship with her mother at times, which makes her passing that much harder to cope with. And he finds out that Gabriel Santiago is who helped her become an informant.

In turn, he tells her about his life. No names, of course. She gets the general story of his little sister. He tells her about Gina and how he was too young and stupid to know a good thing when he saw it. Bellamy talks about his lifelong mythology obsession, which started with the stories his mother would read him. Pieces of himself that have been buried all these months come tumbling out, and instead of panic, he feels relief. He hasn’t felt this much like himself since he entered this horrible country.

Bellamy doesn’t notice the time until it’s well after midnight, and his chest pangs when he realizes he has to leave again. Clarke realizes that too and heads over to the door to check if anyone is in the hallway.

“It’s clear,” she whispers. With a sigh, he puts on his coat and walks over to her. He pauses in front of the door and looks at her. Her golden hair is loose and messy. Her makeup is a bit smeared from the occasional tear. Dark circles form under her eyes. “What?”

“I’m just—”

Memorizing. Securing a mental image of this moment, the last real moment he will have for a long time. It’s a bittersweet moment. A generally pleasant evening overshadowed by what happens outside this hotel suite. But it’s the only moment he has to hold onto.

Her eyelashes bat at him, and in a desperate attempt to avoid her gaze, his eyes land on her lips, and a dangerous thought bleeds into his mind.

The little voice that sounds like Kane’s doesn’t stop him. Neither does Lovejoy’s. The only one he comprehends is his own desperate, longing one.

Time seems to slow as he leans closer to her. His own thoughts are drowned out by his pounding heart. Bellamy’s eyes flicker up to Clarke’s just before his lips press into hers, and they shut as soon as he kisses her. She makes a noise. Not one of protest or surprise, but a little hum. It’s such a beautiful little sound. He could fall in love with such a lovely sound.

Bellamy pulls back, and Clarke’s left hand flies to her lips. The diamond on her finger catches in the light, and he remembers why he shouldn’t have done that.

_You could love her_, the dangerous voice whispers. And he knows it’s true. It would be so easy to slip into a second kiss and hold her tight against him again. Tell her more of his secrets and learn more of hers. Fall deeper for the girl who likes painting sunsets and misses the dances back in Alpha Station. Bellamy could love her so easily that it terrifies him.

“I should…” he mumbles.

“Yes. Right,” she stutters as heat rises to her cheeks. Her fingers still trail over her own lips, as if unsure that the kiss really happened. Despite everything that she’s been through, right now, she looks like a girl who just had her first ever kiss. There’s a shyness now taking over her. A furious blush that he loves. She holds onto her own lips as if scared his kiss would slip away. And Bellamy isn’t sure his heart has ever stuttered this much in his life.

Bellamy darts out the door quickly, but the dangerous voice speaks just as fast.

_You could love her_, it repeats. Those words echo over and over again in his mind as he makes his way across town and stumbles into his run-down motel room.

The words are a cruel taunt. Not because they’re untrue, but because he might love her already, and that’s a terrifying thought that he can’t seem to banish from his mind.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's this? a second update this week??
> 
> yeah, I just finished writing the last chapter, so we're bumping up to two updates a week. Sundays and Wednesdays.

“How is our cousin faring?” Murphy asks as a waiter walks by them.

Bellamy stares at him across the table, relieved to finally see his smug face again after all this radio silence. Their meeting spot is a café, a halfway point between their posts. Murphy’s a forger primarily and a damn good one. Though he does a good job of getting messages across the border too… normally. No one is getting much of anything across the border these days, though.

“Not well,” Bellamy admits. Cousin is code for informant, just like uncle is code for Kane. “She has gotten word to me on numerous occasions,” he continues, and Murphy seems to make a mental note of the _she_, “but I think she needs to get out of the house more. That would improve her health. Our uncle agrees.”

The waiter walks past them again, and Murphy is visibly annoyed by the ears all around them. “Does our uncle agree?” he asks, cocking his head to the side. No, Kane does not agree. He hasn’t heard from Kane at all.

“He told our cousin that at some point she should get some fresh air.” The waiter finally disappears into the kitchen. “And since we aren’t hearing from him much, we might not get approval to get her out of the country before it’s too late.”

Weeks have passed since he last saw Clarke, and she consumes all his thoughts. Either he is thinking about that kiss or he is plotting to break her out of Mt. Weather. Bellamy assumes her visit with Lightbourne went well, though he still worries. Tonight, he’ll see her again and be able to relax a little.

“I have a condition,” Murphy whispers. “I get to come too.”

“You’re going to abandon your post?”

“Look around. Look at what happened to Monty,” he groans. “We either desert or wind up dead. I’m not even sure our messages are getting to him anymore.” Bellamy has had that fear too. “How long until we go?”

“A few months probably,” he admits. He hates the timeline. He’d rather get her out now, but he still has no idea how to get her out. Bellamy has to be practical, even though each day that passes is another where Cage might hurt her.

“No children, right?” Bellamy shakes his head. Children always complicate extractions, but Clarke and Cage have no children. That seems to relax Murphy enough about this plan for now. One target is easier than two or three.

They continue talking until they are both up to date, then they go their separate ways. Bellamy gets home later than expected, which sets his whole day back. He ends up being the last guest to arrive at Wallace’s party.

Cage doesn’t greet Bellamy upon arrival, most likely an act of passive aggression since Bellamy didn’t arrive on time. Clarke is at his side with his hand tight on her waist. Bellamy doesn’t let his gaze linger on them, instead focuses on mingling with a few of Roan’s associates.

Their eyes finally meet at dinner. Emerson is going on and on about the Eden cleanup, and out of sheer boredom, Bellamy let his gaze sweep the table. Clarke is looking right at him, and for half a second, his heart stops. Then, her eyes jerk away, and panic sets in. He looks to the other side of the table, but Cage is enraptured in some story, so he didn’t see the look Bellamy shared with his wife.

Bellamy breathes a sigh of relief and doesn’t make that mistake again for the rest of the meal.

Following dinner, a pianist entertains the guests. While he plays, Bellamy’s mind drifts back to that kiss. Weeks have passed, and it still feels fresh on his lips. He can still hear that sweet little hum if he thinks about the kiss long enough. How long has it been since a simple little kiss occupied all his thoughts? Not since he was a teenager at least.

After a few songs, chatter picks up. The pianist still plays in the background, and Roan begins talking about a hunting trip coming up. Out of the corner of Bellamy’s eye, he sees a flash of Clarke’s blonde hair. Before he can stop himself, he turns and sees Cage kissing her.

It would have been less painful to have been shot. And to make matters worse, when Cage loosens his grip on her, Clarke’s eyes accidentally meet Bellamy’s.

In theory, he knows that Cage kisses Clarke all the time. He also shares a bed with her whenever he wants. This man can kiss and touch every inch of her… and probably does every single night. But knowing that and seeing it are two very different things.

Bellamy jerks his head away and tries to force the sight out of his thoughts. But it’s there, and the same jealousy that consumed him in that coat room floods him now. Only this time, there’s no chance that he’s mistaken her for someone else. Bellamy knows that’s Clarke, and he knows this is real.

Well, the kiss is real. Her reaction to it isn’t. Knowing that lessens the jealousy, but the pang in his chest still remains.

He spends the rest of the night looking for possible exits for Clarke, and it distracts him from the dangerous thoughts. During the drive home, he goes through each possible exit strategy, working through each one from every angle he can think of until he’s certain there’s no way it will work. He runs out of ideas before he gets home, and his mind is flooded with two things he can’t let himself think about: the possibility that he won’t get Clarke out and the image of her blushing face after he kissed her.

Bellamy gives into the latter. Thinking about Clarke being trapped with Cage forever is too painful, so he lets himself slip back into the beautiful, torturous memory of their one and only kiss.

When he enters his apartment, he quickly washes those thoughts away by going through the messages Clarke left for him. The first two seem pretty standard. More dates and times and an update on when Lightbourne is moving the next shipment of weapons. But the last one is unlike any other Clarke has left him. It’s a personal note.

_One week from tomorrow. The suite. Please_.

He shouldn’t. Not after that kiss. It’s too dangerous.

Yet after a week of going back and forth on the issue, Bellamy finds himself on a train, then at a motel outside of town, before finally slipping into Clarke’s hotel suite.

Clarke comes into her suite alone, and Bellamy silently slips out from his hiding spot. Her reflection shows in the window across the room, and she’s frozen. Her eyes dart about the room and she bites down on her lip. She’s looking for him. Clarke is looking for him but is scared he isn’t there.

“Clarke,” he says, and her reflection relaxes in relief. She really worried that he wouldn’t come? Clarke is smart. She must know what kind of a hold she has over him. Surely, she must know.

She doesn’t move until Bellamy steps in view, and when she does, it’s only a small step forward before she stops herself.

Her head drops and her gaze fixes on the floor. Though she has stopped moving, he hasn’t. Bellamy is pulled toward her by something far stronger than he is. But he stops just shy of pulling her into him.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… I know it’s too risky for you to come here,” she mutters, shaking her head. “I never should have asked you to—”

“I knew the risk and came anyway,” he cuts her off, and her head jerks up. Her bright eyes pierce him as soon as she meets his gaze. Her lip is taken between her teeth, then released.

“No,” she huffs. “This isn’t like earlier. I don’t have anything new for you…”

A smile tugs at his lips. Does she really think he didn’t suspect that already? If she had anything for him, she would have gotten it to him a week ago. Either this is about her escape, which he doubts because she seems to have no hope of escaping, or this is about what happened last time they were in this suite together.

“I don’t just come because you have something for me,” Bellamy says with a forced laugh. “You had nothing for me last time too.”

“So…” Her gaze drops back to the floor. “So why do you—”

“You know why.” That makes her look back up at him, her eyes wide and lips parted. The surprise behind those blue eyes of hers melts into something heavier. She’s thinking, trying to make sense of what he’s saying. His stomach clenches when he realizes she might be asking herself if this is real or if Bellamy is playing her too. If he were in her shoes, he would wonder the same thing. “This is real,” he swears. She narrows her eyes in confusion. Maybe that isn’t what she is trying to calculate.

She pushes a piece of hair back, and the diamond on her finger flashes in the light. _Oh_. That’s what she’s thinking about. For a moment, Bellamy forgot she has a husband. A husband she doesn’t love, but a husband, nonetheless. This isn’t a risk only for Bellamy. This is a serious risk for her as well. If Cage ever found out…

Clarke moves. For a split second, it seems like she’s moving away from him. But then, she’s closer. Just a breath away. Her eyes seem cautious, scanning Bellamy’s face quickly as she approaches.

“Why did you come?” she asks, somehow both nervous and authoritative at the same time.

“For you,” he admits, and her palm rests right on top of his pounding heart. It seems like a lie. It implies he had some kind of choice in this. But there was no choice to make. As soon as he read her note, he knew he would end up right here. “Only for you.”

The last time they kissed, it was quick and over too soon. His thoughts weren’t coherent enough to register what was happening or why he was doing it. The kiss was bold when it had no right to be.

But this time, it’s slow. Cautious. Clarke moves inch by inch, her gaze flickering between his eyes and mouth. Bellamy stands frozen, pinned where he stands by the warm hand on his chest and the soft eyes that he misses so much when they’re apart. He only moves to bring his head down toward her so that she does not have to stand on the top of her toes to reach his lips.

Soft lips press into his, more like a relieved breath than a kiss. Her arm wraps around the back of his neck, and one of his snakes around her small waist. His hand takes her cheek, holding her there so he can kiss her the way he has needed to kiss her for too long. She hums again, and he breaks the kiss to smile at the beautiful sound. How he loves that sound.

Bellamy chases it. Kissing her hard and deep. Keeping her pressed against him. Clarke hums happily every now and then, each time making his heart stammer. They keep this going until it gets too hard to breathe, and even then, he doesn’t want to stop. But his traitorous stomach growls and Clarke insists on calling for dinner.

They sit beside each other while they eat. Bellamy keeps one arm around her waist and she leans into him. They don’t speak much tonight. The air feels too thick to do much more than eat, though he does occasionally steal a kiss to her cheek. His body buzzes while he waits for Clarke to finish. Her leg is pressed against his. Her body is warm against his. And her lips are so close yet so far.

She blushes, seeming to realize that he has been staring at her profile. Clarke turns and meets his gaze. “When do you have to go?” she whispers.

“Not for a while.” He could stay all night, but he wouldn’t dare say that. “I’ll leave whenever you want me to.”

“So, you’ll never leave?” she teases, and before his grin could grow any more goofy, he slams a kiss to her giggling mouth. They kiss like that for a while, all stupid and happy. But then, Clarke’s fingers in his hair seem to tighten, and Bellamy’s kisses grow hungrier. Before he knows it, they’ve stumbled to their feet, and Clarke pulls him between kisses down the hallway.

_You could stop now_, a responsible voice whispers to him. And Bellamy should probably listen. But being this close to her feels so good, and when was the last time Bellamy felt good? His life is all war and lies. He is surrounded by monsters all day and fears he might die here in Sanctum, found out just like all the others before him.

Everything is so dark. Everything except her.

Clarke is his light. A life-preserver thrown to keep him from drowning in all the lies. A beautiful hum contrasted with the sounds of firing squads and breaking news on the radio. A smile so radiant that Bellamy smiles in response after months of forgetting how.

So, he doesn’t stop. He lets himself be reckless and selfish as he kisses his way down her pale throat. Clothes fall to the ground. Clarke clings to him while he carries her to the bed. Bellamy drags Cage’s ring off her finger and tosses his fake one beside it on the nightstand.

He gives in to the light and doesn’t give it a second thought until she’s above him, golden hair falling in his face. Her eyes have fallen shut but her lips part as a quiet moan escapes. Clarke looks so happy and at peace that Bellamy almost cries at the beautiful sight. And he knows he should have listened to the responsible voice telling him to stop. Because now that he’s had this… now that he has touched and kissed every inch and curve of her… he knows he can never stop. Bellamy will always be longing for this right here. For the rest of his life, however long that ends up being.

He tells her that. He whispers it in her ear when she leans down over him. He murmurs it against her throat. He cries it while he shudders inside her. He says it after while her face is buried into his neck and her legs tangled with his under the sheets.

Bellamy loves her. He doesn’t tell her that just yet. Those are words too real to be had here in Sanctum where Bellamy and Clarke both live in disguise. Those are words to be saved for when he can be Bellamy Blake and she can be Clarke Griffin again. Then, he’ll tell her. Over and over again to make up for all the times he doesn’t tell her here. Once she’s safe, she’ll know.


	9. Chapter 9

Light flitters into the room too soon. A groan escapes him before he can stop it, and Clarke stirs beside him. She’s a light sleeper. And a stealer of blankets. Occasionally, she serves as a sort of blanket herself with how she drapes herself over him while she sleeps.

No matter how many times they do this, Bellamy cannot get used to her sleeping patterns. He’s trained to jerk awake at any disturbance, used to it being something like a break in or a gunshot… not the girl he loves mumbling nonsense or pulling herself closer to him in her sleep. He always leaves this suite feeling exhausted, and yet, he wouldn’t have it any other way. Because nothing will ever compare to Clarke instinctively sliding closer when Bellamy climbs into bed or feeling her soft breathing against his chest.

“Go back to sleep,” he whispers to her. Clarke pulls herself closer, knowing exactly what will happen next.

“Just a little longer,” she mumbles. Bellamy sighs and presses a kiss to her forehead.

“A few more minutes,” Bellamy concedes. He half expects Clarke to pull him on top of her and bat her eyelashes until he’s fucking her for the third time this visit. She’s done it before. Her little way of delaying the inevitable. But she just buries her face into his neck and sighs. “You have your goal for this week.”

Clarke huffs. “Bellamy. The only way I’m getting out of that castle is through the front door,” she groans. “And I can promise that will not happen.”

The two of them have been working on the escape plan. He can’t find an unguarded section of that home, especially not with Cage growing more and more paranoid every day. It doesn’t help that Clarke made an escape attempt once before, though she won’t tell Bellamy what Cage did to her that scared her so badly that she tried to run so early in the marriage.

He suspects Clarke is right. The only way she can escape is through the front door, which requires a plan with a good amount of deception. If it comes to that, then they’ll find a way to make it work. Between the two of them, one of them is bound to come up with a brilliant enough lie to get her out. But for now, Bellamy wants to make sure there isn’t another way out.

“Just keep looking,” he whispers. “It’s easier to run in the middle of the night when everyone thinks you’re asleep. You’ll be too far away by the time he realizes you’re gone. If we have to do it right under their noses, then we will. But trust me, it’s riskier.”

“I do trust you,” she reassures. Bellamy threads his fingers through her hair, and Clarke sleepily pushes her head up to look at him. His finger trails down her cheek, and he finds himself memorizing this moment. Bellamy does that a lot these days. He almost got caught without his papers at a check point last week. Another spy was lined up and shot. He has nightmares of meeting the same fate, especially when he is so close to Cage Wallace. So, he takes an extra moment to remember these sweet moments with her. He’s never guaranteed another, and if he does blow his cover and finds himself in front of a firing squad, he wants to have the memory of her sleepy, happy face peering up at him in bed to hold onto in those last moments.

The light of morning exposes a bruise on her neck Bellamy hadn’t noticed last night. Cage’s hand gripping her throat, probably. Though Clarke refuses to tell Bellamy what exactly Cage does to her during his rages.

“I’ll kill him,” Bellamy whispers as he trails a finger over the light bruise. He thinks about killing Cage all the time. Poison. Bullet. Choking him with his bare hands like the bastard deserves.

He half expects Clarke to give him a concerned look, but instead she asks, “How?”

“Are you genuinely asking or pointing out that I would never get away with it?”

“No, I’m asking how you would plan to get away with it,” she explains. “Surely, they teach spies how to do that.” Something about her tone tells him this isn’t just curiosity talking. But he answers her anyway.

“Slow poison, though that would be hard to pull off with how little I am invited over these days. He’s not an easy man to kill. Paranoid marks are hard. I might have to enlist the help of a servant.”

“That seems risky,” she says, and he knows she’s right. Truth is, there isn’t a clean way to kill Cage Wallace. And he hates it. Bellamy wants him dead more than anything, and he can’t actually kill him. “I tried to kill him once.”

She says it so quietly that he almost misses it.

“Last time we went to the cabin, I switched out the bullets for his father’s rifle with newer ones so that it might backfire when he went hunting. But he decided not to hunt that trip, something about a sore shoulder, I think. And since the war started, he hasn’t had the time to go hunting again.”

“He might have noticed the bullets were different,” Bellamy sighs, but Clarke shakes her head.

“They’re nearly identical, and Cage is rather careless when we’re alone. He wouldn’t bother to check.”

Bellamy lets his head fall back on the pillow as he plays out the scenario. Clarke stays in the cabin or is possibly left back at Mt. Weather, Cage goes hunting, the gun backfires. A horrible accident, everyone would say. Clarke would be a widow. Finally free. And no one would suspect her of doing it. If it had worked, it would have been brilliant. He might steal that idea one day.

“I think you should have been a spy,” he teases, and Clarke scrunches her nose up at him. Bellamy doesn’t ask what provoked her into attempting to kill her husband. She won’t tell him about her bruises. She hasn’t told him about what Cage did to convince her to work against him. And she probably won’t tell him why she decided trying to kill him was worth the risk. But one day, she will. Just like he will tell her everything too.

She kisses him. One of those long kisses where she doesn’t want him to leave just yet. But he has to. Bellamy always has to leave her, and he hates it every single time.

Clarke whines when he does leave, and it hurts walking away knowing that she will cry as soon as he slips out the front door. She confessed that she always cries when he leaves, and he wished she hadn’t admitted that. Now, it makes each step away from her so much harder even though it’s necessary.

He sees her just two weeks later, but it hardly counts as seeing her when both their masks are on. Bellamy spends most of the evening calculating if it’s feasible for Clarke to climb down from her window without being seen, but when he comes to thank her for a lovely party, she whispers that her windows are locked shut. Of course, they are. Before anything else can be said, her husband joins them and asks him how he knows Daniel Lee.

Bellamy doesn’t react to hearing Murphy’s false name, but his stomach clenches. Bellamy and Murphy took care to pick a meeting spot where no one of importance would see them together… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t eyes everywhere.

“One of Emerson’s men spotted the two of you together at a café. I had no idea you two were friends,” Cage says casually. There is no sign of accusation in his voice, and Cage tends to betray his emotions after as many drinks as he has had.

“Our wives were close friends,” Bellamy says, letting his anxiety be read as grief instead. “I don’t care much for the man, but my wife had a few broaches that I know she would want Mrs. Lee to have.”

Cage looks disinterested now, not even attempting to look consoling as Bellamy mentions his fake dead wife. Clarke looks at him oddly, as if she knows how close of a call this was without Bellamy ever telling her about Murphy or Daniel Lee.

Bellamy leaves abruptly, trying not to look shaken by what just happened. It was nothing, really. Cage was just curious. Lee and Lovejoy shouldn’t cross paths, not in their very different lines of work. It makes sense that he asked, and Bellamy answered well enough to get by.

Still, he doesn’t sleep that night. Bellamy slipped up. His cover could have been blown. He could have gotten both him and Murphy in front of a firing squad. No, first they would be questioned. Tortured for information. Beaten. Starved. Broken. Then, eventually, in front of the firing squad. Clarke would read his name on a list in the newspaper.

They have to leave. Bellamy hasn’t been careful enough, and he’s putting everyone else at risk. He never did figure out how to get Clarke out of Mt. Weather, so he returns to his first idea of smuggling her out of the capital.

In a matter of hours, he has a vague idea of a plan and has picked up Murphy, who is all too eager to get out of this country.

They’ll leave in the evening after Clarke calls for dinner. Bellamy rides with Murphy, who hides a few blocks away while Bellamy goes to retrieve Clarke. He slips into her suite without issue and waits.

Hours pass, and she never arrives.

There are a thousand plausible explanations. She could be sick. There could be an important dinner to attend. Cage just had five of his factories seized by the government, so they may not be able to afford these shopping trips anymore.

And then, there’s the more terrifying explanation: Cage figured out that Clarke has been having an affair while in the capital.

Bellamy shakes as he sneaks back down the stairs. He lingers in the lobby for a while, hoping to hear some kind of gossip for why Clarke cancelled the trip, but he hears nothing… which confirms his fear.

Outside, he wretches. His lunch comes back up and splatters all over the pavement, and all Bellamy can see are the bruises that Cage leaves on Clarke growing to cover all her skin. He stumbles back to the car, dizzy and panicked and imagining the sound of Clarke’s horrible screams.

“Where is she?”

“She never showed. I think Cage knows,” Bellamy chokes out.

“That you’re sleeping with his wife?” Murphy asks without missing a beat, and Bellamy pales. He never told Murphy about that. “Oh, come on. I know you’re in love with her. It’s not that giant of a leap to assume you’re having an affair with her.”

“He’s going to kill her,” Bellamy says, shaking his head as Murphy takes off driving.

“No, he’s not. He doesn’t know,” he huffs. “If he knew, his focus would be on killing you, not her. Cage thinks she’s just a dumb girl. You’re the one who set out to take what was his. Sure, he’d hurt her bad, but I don’t think he would kill her.”

Bellamy is about to scream at him until his words start to sink in. He’s right. If Cage knew about Bellamy and Clarke, Bellamy would be dead right now. But he’s not, which means Cage doesn’t know. Clarke is safe… for now.

“It could be explained by anything,” Bellamy reasons, more to himself than to Murphy. He hums in response, not taking his eyes off the road.

Once Bellamy calms down, Murphy suggests they cross the border anyway. They fight, because there is no way he is leaving Clarke behind. Murphy threatens to take off on his own then, but it’s not a serious threat. They resolve to wait another week before trying to extract her again. In that time, Bellamy will see her at another party and can figure out what happened tonight.


	10. Chapter 10

Air finally fills his lungs when he sees her across the party. The days since the night she didn’t arrive at her suite have passed by at an agonizing pace. His mind is horribly creative at coming up with all sorts of worst case scenarios, and he has hardly slept a wink.

Clarke sees him before her husband does, and their eyes lock for a few beautiful seconds before she alerts Cage to their newest guest’s presence. Cage smiles at his wife with a softness Bellamy hasn’t seen in a while. It’s a look he exchanged with her more in the first parties Bellamy attended, but the war has taken its toll on Cage and his finances, leaving little energy for affection. And yet, tonight he looks like a man madly in love and happy.

His hand rests at Clarke’s back as the two of them approach, and his smile is positively contagious. Bellamy doesn’t trust it, not when he can’t make sense of it. Is he up to something? Has he figured out a way to keep his factories?

“Mr. Lovejoy,” he greets jovially. Did Bellamy miss an important strike? Did thousands die at the hands of Wallace’s weapons? Is that why he is so happy tonight?

“Mr. Wallace,” Bellamy says, letting him nearly break his hand in their handshake. When he turns to look at Clarke, there is something odd in her expression. Not distress, exactly. But a soft nervousness that he rarely sees from her. “Mrs. Wallace,” he says when her husband lets go of his hand, and Bellamy lifts hers to his lips. He’s so relieved to see her that he could cry.

The second that his lips touch her gloved hand doesn’t last long enough, and Clarke is whisked off to greet the next guest. The panic that consumed him all week has been replaced by confusion over Cage’s good mood and Clarke’s odd one. Bellamy looks for any opportunity to talk to Clarke alone, but Cage never once leaves her side. The only time they separate is when dinner begins and they take their places at opposite ends of the table, but even then, Cage seems to be stealing glances at her throughout the meal like a lovesick schoolboy.

Jealousy bubbles up inside him during the meal, and it shouldn’t. Clarke doesn’t love Cage. He doesn’t know if she loves Bellamy for certain yet, but he thinks she might. Bellamy has more of her heart than Cage ever has, but knowing that doesn’t stop him from wondering what Clarke might have said or done to make Cage look at her so lovingly after months of not viewing her as anything more than another pretty object in his home full of pretty objects.

All he wants is to take her far from here. He just has to figure out how.

The answer he has been looking for comes to him as everyone moves to the ballroom. Emerson is drunk and almost knocks him over as he falls. Bellamy grabs onto the nearest person to stable himself, only to jerk his hand away in a panic when he sees Clarke’s pale skin beneath his hand.

“Apologies, Mrs. Wallace,” he stutters out, looking to make sure Cage didn’t see.

A scoff comes from her, and when the head turns, it belongs to Josephine, not Clarke. Twice he’s fallen for that. And if Bellamy, a man who has studied Clarke and swears he could pick her out of a crowd of thousands, could fall for this, then there is a chance the guards of the Mt. Weather castle might fall for it too. Clarke could walk right out the front door if they think she is Josephine.

“Miss Lightbourne,” Josephine snaps.

“Apologies, Miss Lightbourne,” Bellamy corrects with a laugh. “You two just look rather similar from behind.”

There’s no amusement in her gaze, but when he offers his arm to her, she takes it. “We look nothing alike,” she hisses. “It is not a compliment to compare me to a girl who is blowing up like a balloon and testing the seams of that dull gown.”

Bellamy furrows his eyebrows but does not engage. Josephine is normally not so blunt with her petty remarks, usually reserving these crueler thoughts for when Clarke is directly taking attention away from her.

He escorts her into the ballroom, and she doesn’t release him right away. Cage and Clarke are talking in a cluster of ten or so people. Bellamy lets himself look right at her for a moment, hoping she can feel his gaze and know that he needs to talk to her tonight.

Josephine groans beside him.

“Is something wrong?” he asks through gritted teeth.

“It’s not impressive,” she mutters before snatching a glass of champagne off a tray. She takes a sip and groans again. “Not impressive enough to warrant bringing out the best champagne. Any woman can get pregnant. It’s not a miracle, yet they’re all fawning over her.”

His head snaps back in Clarke’s direction. She’s pregnant. His heart stutters at the realization, and he fights every muscle on his face to keep his face neutral.

That’s why she couldn’t come to the suite. Cage found out she is pregnant and either felt too protective to let her out of his sight or wanted to celebrate with her. Bellamy can’t blame him. Those same feelings wash over him now as his eyes beg for her to look back at him.

When she does, his heart nearly stops. All it takes is a nervous look from her, and it confirms everything. She is pregnant. The baby might be his. The odds are slim. Bellamy steals one or two nights a month with her while her husband has every other one. But she wants it to be his. And just as he wants to pull her into his arms and kiss her senseless, she wants the same. But they can’t. Not here. _Not yet_.

Clarke whispers something to Cage, and though he looks reluctant, he lets her leave his side. Bellamy counts to thirty seconds once she leaves the ballroom before following after her. She leads him to an abandoned balcony that smells of cigar smoke from whoever was last out here. Her fingers tap nervously against the railing as she waits for him to join her.

Bellamy shuts the doors behind him, and Clarke whips around. Her blue eyes are wide and worried as she stares at him.

“You know,” she whispers, and he nods. Clarke seems to be studying him for something, a reaction perhaps?

“Josephine told me.” Clarke curses under her breath. “You had to know she would gossip.”

“I didn’t tell anyone but Cage,” she says. No doubt Cage told the good news to anyone who would listen. “I wanted to tell you myself.”

Bellamy glances behind him, looking for any figures in the windows. There aren’t any, but he has to play it safe. So, he gestures with his head for Clarke to follow him out of the view of the windows. No one else is outside at the moment, and once he has Clarke up against the brick wall, they have their stolen moment of privacy.

He kisses her. It’s so fast that it’s over before he can really enjoy it, but he doesn’t know how long they have this moment for. His hand rests over her stomach, trying to process that a baby grows inside her now. An innocent, helpless, little thing that he already loves more than his own life created at a time of war. Bellamy, a man who prides himself on being scared of nothing, is both awed and terrified by the life blooming inside Clarke.

“It might not be yours,” Clarke whispers. He meets her worried gaze.

“Do you want it to be mine?”

“Of course, but—”

“Then, it’s mine.” He kisses her again to seal that promise. When he pulls away, he steps back to check the windows again. They’re still in the clear.

“I have to leave Mt. Weather,” she tells him.

“I know, but I finally—”

“No, you don’t understand. I have to get away from him.” Bellamy finds himself looking over her for any marks despite knowing he would find none. She’s good at hiding them. And with how enamored Cage seemed to be earlier, he would think that Clarke is in the clear for now.

“Did he hurt you?” Bellamy growls, and she shakes her head. Tears form in her eyes, and Bellamy presses closer to calm her.

“No, but last time, he did.” Last time? What does she mean by last time?

He’s wiping away her tears before he realizes what she means. _Last time she was pregnant_. Clarke had never told him she had been pregnant before, nor had he learned that from gossip… and that’s exactly the kind of thing he would have learned from gossip.

She doesn’t have to tell him what happened. He can guess at what Cage did to her, and now he knows why she tried to run and why she agreed to be an informant. She miscarried because of his temper, and now she’s shaking in Bellamy’s arms at the thought of that happening again.

“I have a plan,” he whispers into her hair. “Josephine will be how you get out.” Clarke scoffs. “No, listen. You two look alike. You can’t walk out of here, but she can.”

A noise separates them. Bellamy crosses to the railing before anyone can spot them so close. When he looks over his shoulder, it’s just Emerson drunkenly falling to a couch, paying no attention to them. Bellamy spares a glance at Clarke, and she’s worked through what he’s suggesting.

“Tuesday,” she whispers. “I’m having her over for tea.”

“Tuesday,” he repeats. That could work. He and Murphy could be ready to go tonight if need be. The plan is already forming in his mind, but he doesn’t have the time to tell it all to her. Cage could come looking for her at any second, and Bellamy doesn’t want anyone to know they even so much as shared a balcony this evening.

“How do I—”

“I’ll slip you a note. Go back before he comes looking.”

Bellamy waits five minutes before returning to the party. Clarke has returned at her husband’s side, and no one seems the wiser. He is mostly left alone, which gives him ample time to run through the plan over and over until he works out all the kinks. Once it’s running like clockwork, he finds his coat, pulls out his notepad, and writes down the instructions for Clarke.

He has them folded up into his palm as he approaches the Wallace’s one last time. He says his goodbyes just as he always does, only this time saying goodbye to Clarke first. As he lifts her hand up to his lips, he slips the folded paper into her palm, not letting go until she has it grasped. Then, he thanks Mr. Wallace for a lovely evening and turns to leave.

The next time he sees Clarke’s face, it will be when she is walking out of Mt. Weather for good.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> almost forgot to post today oops sorry guys

The thing about almost getting caught is that even when you think you’re prepared for it, you’re not.

His plans all involve if things go wrong on Tuesday, not two days after the dinner party when John Murphy comes bursting into his apartment in the middle of the night saying his cover is blown. So, instead of making meticulous plans for if things go awry with Clarke, Bellamy spends the next few days destroying documents, hiding overnight under a bridge with only Murphy for warmth, and shaving off his beard and cutting his hair short so he won’t be recognized.

Bellamy could have hidden Murphy in his apartment and rode it out if no one had spotted them at that café. But he was spotted with him. Mr. Lovejoy and Mr. Lee have been publicly linked. So, if Mr. Lee is a spy, then so is Mr. Lovejoy. Thus, they both fled and destroyed all identification cards that might be suspect, which is all but their real ones. Murphy only had time to forge one new identity, and they both agreed that it had to be Clarke’s. Well, Bellamy said it had to be Clarke’s. Murphy argued until he was too tired and gave in.

The days pass in a wave of chaos. Bellamy steals a car. Murphy picks every fight he can, and Bellamy seriously considers if killing him will increase his chances of success but ultimately decides against it. Murphy seems to have the same line of thought and comes to the same conclusion about him. They get paranoid and steal a different car.

Somehow, they make it to Tuesday relatively unharmed. Murphy has a nasty bruise on his side because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and Bellamy has a matching on near his collarbone from when he had to step in when Murphy didn’t keep his mouth shut.

The car lingers outside the estate. Josephine’s driver pulled up to the front of the Wallace’s home and is now holding the door for Josephine, who is wearing thick black sunglasses and swats at his hand when he tries to help her get out. Murphy loses the coin toss and has to be the one to tiptoe across the grounds toward the shiny black car. Bellamy watches from their stolen car as Josephine’s driver talks with one of the servants, and Murphy slips into the backseat of the car without anyone noticing.

As Bellamy waits, his eyes drift upstairs. Somewhere up there, Clarke is now greeting Josephine, apologizing profusely for not meeting her downstairs. But she feels unwell. Morning sickness, she’ll claim. To which Josephine will give a pitying reply and some kind of backhanded compliment.

Bellamy follows the car from a distance and comes to a stop when the driver parks. Through the windows, he watches Murphy emerge from the backseat and knock the man unconscious. From here, it gets easier. They undress the driver and Bellamy changes into his clothes, though they are far too tight for him. Murphy stays by their stolen car, and Bellamy drives back when it’s time to get Clarke.

The waiting is the worst part. Bellamy has no idea if Clarke got ahold of something to drug Josephine’s tea with. He can’t help her if one of the servants try to enter while Clarke is switching into Josephine’s clothes. There is no contingency plan for if someone notices she is not Josephine Lightbourne. Even the smallest misstep would be fatal.

He’s almost thankful for the mess Murphy dropped on his doorstep all those days ago. If he hadn’t been distracted by having to disappear, he would have made himself sick with all the ways this reckless plan of his could go wrong.

The front door opens, and Bellamy darts around the car to open the door. He glances up just long enough to make certain it’s Clarke walking toward him in Josephine’s dress from earlier and those thick sunglasses, then fixes his eyes downcast. When he tries to take her hand to help her into the car, she swats his hand away just like Josephine would, and he has to bite back a smile the entire walk back to the driver’s side of the car.

After the estate has finally shrunk into the background, Clarke lets out a sigh.

“Tell me it all went according to plan,” he pleads. He’s still smiling, though. He can’t help it. They made it through the hardest part.

“Of course, it didn’t. Josephine didn’t want any tea. She’s trying to slim down, she said.”

“She’s awake?” he shouts, nearly veering off the road when he turns back to look at Clarke.

“No, but it’s not as though I could force her to drink the tea. I had to improvise.”

“With what?”

“With a lamp.”

Bellamy barks out a laugh at the image of Clarke knocking Josephine out with a lamp. What he would give to have been able to see that.

“It’s not funny!” she groans, but a laugh is bubbling up within her too. “Everything almost fell apart, Bell!”

“Things almost falling apart is the theme of the week, love. Murphy’s cover was blown and I’ve been on the run because of it.”

Clarke leans forward in the backseat and reaches out to touch his cheek, feeling his freshly shaven face. “Who is Murphy?” she asks, and he grabs her hand to kiss her palm before releasing her.

“The man who forged your new identification cards. You will hate him.” Bellamy turns into where he left Murphy and the driver. Murphy is strumming on the wheel, and Bellamy is almost impressed to see Murphy hasn’t ditched them yet. Then, he remembers that Bellamy held onto his identification cards so he couldn’t leave without him, and he’s less impressed.

There would be time for introductions later. Clarke changes out of Josephine’s dress, and Murphy helps Bellamy switch outfits again and put the driver back in the car. The poor man will wake up confused in a few hours with a bad headache. So will Josephine. But he only feels bad about the driver. Josephine had this coming.

The three of them pile into the stolen car and take off toward the Eligius border. Clarke sits in front with Bellamy, and Murphy is lounged across the backseat filling Clarke in on their “adventures” from the past week. Once he’s finally caught her all up, he asks, “So, did Blake or your husband knock you up?”

“Murphy!” Bellamy screams.

“How did you know I—”

“Noticing things about people is quite literally my job,” Murphy chuckles. Bellamy reaches back and smacks him. “Okay, okay. I’ll stop.”

The car falls into blissful silence after that. Murphy drifts off into a heavy sleep, probably the best sleep he’s had in days. Clarke is more restless, only sleeping for minutes at a time before jerking awake. After the third time she does this, his hand finds hers, and Clarke leans into his arm. She sleeps like the dead after that.

They stop twice before reaching the border. Clarke stirs but never really wakes up. Murphy keeps on snoring.

It’s dark by the time they reach the Eligius border. Bellamy wakes up the car as they approach, making sure each of them have their identification in hand.

The officer that approaches is not in a Sanctum uniform, and Bellamy lets out a sigh of relief. The Eligius soldiers were no saints, but he could deal with them. This one’s name tag says Shaw.

“Identification please,” he says, bored. Clarke and Murphy both hand Bellamy theirs, and he gives Officer Shaw all three at once. He flips through them. Around them, a few other cars have been stopped, one being searched by a handful of officers as the family stands outside it. Bellamy doesn’t think he has anything to hide in this car, other than the fact that the car is stolen. “So, you are traveling with your wife and…”

“Brother-in-law,” Bellamy says. It made more sense to make Murphy and Clarke siblings. They look nothing alike, but it’s more plausible than Bellamy and Murphy being brothers.

“Reason for visit?”

“To find a doctor for my wife. We’re expecting.”

The man’s eyes flicker to the seat beside Bellamy where Clarke is sitting with her hand on her belly. “Congratulations,” he says with a yawn. “But don’t they have doctors in Sanctum?”

Maybe it’s how long he’s been awake. Or how long he’s been driving. Or just the exhaustion of spending so many months being terrified that Clarke would get hurt or he would get caught. But he just blanks right in front of this officer.

“You know Lightbourne took all the good doctors to the front,” Murphy grumbles from the backseat. “You think I’m going let one of them senile ones that weren’t fit for war take care of my baby sister?”

“It’s alright,” Clarke groans.

“This is my nephew John we’re talking about!” Murphy continues, much to the officer’s annoyance. Classic move right out of Marcus Kane’s handbook. When in doubt, annoy them into letting you pass.

“I’m not naming my child after you!” Clarke says, turning around to face Murphy in the backseat.

“After everything I’ve done for you—”

“Everything you’ve done?”

“—and the poor bastard who got stuck married to you—”

They continue on like that, raising their voices higher and higher with their made-up fight. Bellamy leans toward Shaw and mutters, “Where in Eligius could I ditch the in-law?”

He laughs quietly and rolls his eyes. “We don’t want him,” he jokes. “You all are good to go. Good luck. You’ll need it.” The cards are handed back to him, and Clarke and Murphy have moved on to fighting about Murphy’s fake drinking problem as they roll past the check point.

“You two can stop now,” Bellamy has to shout once they’re far enough away. “We should be okay from here on out.”

It feels weird saying it out loud. He’s lost track of how long he’s spent inside of Sanctum, and now, he’s free. They’re all free. It would be near impossible for Cage to get to Clarke now, though he wouldn’t put it past the man to try. Still, tracking them would be difficult.

“So, what now?” Murphy asks, leaning forward in his seat.

“Now, we find a hotel to sleep in for the night. Tomorrow, we contact Kane and tell him to get us the Hell out of here.”

“Slight problem. How do you think we are going to pay for a hotel?” he asks, and Bellamy groans. Right. They’ll have to sleep in the damn stolen car because they’ve already burned through the cash that lined the one duffel Bellamy got out of his flat.

“Find a pawn shop,” Clarke says. “Preferably in a bad part of town where they won’t ask too many questions.” When he opens his mouth to ask why, she wiggles her left hand, highlighting the massive wedding ring on her finger.

So, they find a pawn shop. Obviously, they don’t get exactly what the ring is worth, but they get more than enough to keep them afloat while they wait for Kane to bring them home. They buy a simple replacement ring for Clarke so they can keep up the married ruse.

They get two hotel rooms, one for Murphy and one for Bellamy and Clarke. It’s nothing like the lavish room they used to spend their stolen evenings in. No gourmet meals brought up to their room, no plush mattress, no window that lets the light of the city seep in. But the buzzing he always felt under his skin in that suite back in Sanctum is the same. It’s the warmth that vibrates through him whenever he gets to be with her. The place doesn’t matter. Just her.

Clarke falls onto the bed and moans in relief. Bellamy laughs as he lies down beside her over the rough comforter. Her head turns in his direction, and he slides his fingers across her cheeks until they find her lips.

“You haven’t kissed me yet today,” Clarke whispers.

“A mistake I intend to never repeat,” he teases before kissing her. There is no heat behind it. No seduction or hunger. Just relief. Sweet, beautiful relief.

They lie like that for a while, sharing lazy kisses and resting their foreheads against each other. They never really held each other like this in Sanctum. Everything always felt so desperate and rushed. Never knowing if it would be the last time they would touch has that effect, he supposes.

But they see the light at the end of the tunnel, it seems. Bellamy isn’t holding onto her tightly like he’s afraid he might lose her tomorrow. He’s melting into the embrace, just enjoying her touch. While they aren’t out of the woods yet, here in Eligius, they both seem to have gained the ability to hope again. They will have more kisses. This won’t be the last time. There is no rush. _Not yet_ doesn’t exist anymore.

Clarke shifts onto her back, and Bellamy’s hand slides over her stomach. She doesn’t show yet. Probably won’t for a while. He hopes they’re all safely in Arkadia before she does start to show. They could arrange a divorce for her and then they could marry before anyone suspected a thing.

“Did you mean what you said?” she whispers.

“Depends on what I said,” he teases, and Clarke huffs. “Which thing that I said?”

“About it being yours no matter what.”

Her bright eyes pierce him as she nervously awaits his answer. A smile tugs at his lips.

Here they are, far from Mt. Weather and Sanctum, in an odd place where hope blooms. He’s played the part of her husband almost all day and aches for the day when it’s no longer a part he plays but instead who he is. He has already pictured their quiet service at city hall. Bellamy traces his fingers up and down her abdomen as he imagines the baby growing larger inside her. He sees Clarke with the baby, happier than he’s ever seen her. He imagines the three of them at a kitchen table after a long day, and he wants it so badly that it hurts.

“Yes, I meant that.” Her brows are still furrowed, so he adds, “I love him or her already.”

Something flashes behind Clarke’s eyes, and he imagines he has the same thought. How strange it is to say that before he has ever said that he loves her.

“What about me?” she asks, and the corners of her mouth turn upwards ever so slightly. Clarke knows the answer. She would have to be blind not to.

“You?” he teases. Her nose scrunches up. “My love,” he whispers, and Clarke’s entire face beams at the endearment. “You must already know how desperately I love you.”

Though she is quiet, he hears her little gasp. It’s not news. Yet she melts as if it were.

“I love you too,” she murmurs, and it’s like hearing music for the first time. As if only now understanding how beautiful a sound can be.

They kiss. Hungry, but not quite like before. This isn’t the desperate kissing of star-crossed lovers during a tryst. Tonight, they’ve tasted love on their tongue and cannot stop chasing it now. They push and pull against each other, desperate to press as close together as possible. Hair is tugged, lips are bitten, clothes are thrown across the room.

All masks are gone now. Mr. Lovejoy and Mrs. Wallace are dead. Just Bellamy Blake, Clarke Griffin, and the child they’re going to bring into this world remain.


	12. Chapter 12

It takes a week to hear back from Kane. They’re to go to the embassy and await further instructions.

It also takes a week for news of Cage Wallace’s missing wife to reach Eligius newspapers… which complicates their plan to get across the country to the Embassy and await those further instructions. Eligius is not under as strict rule as Sanctum, but there are still checkpoints to get through. And it’s rather hard to convince an officer that Clarke is not Clarke Wallace when her own photo has been published in the paper.

The only nice thing about the photo being seen by the entire country is that the Clarke they’re looking for is covered in thick, expensive makeup and glittering jewels. But now, she’s cut her hair short, dressed as plainly as Bellamy and Murphy, and is too overcome by morning sickness to look anything but sickly when they do hit the checkpoints.

It takes another switch of cars, four days, a bribe here and there, and one instance where Clarke threw up on Officer McCreary’s boots for them to make it to the embassy. From there, it gets easier. Well, their journey home gets easier. Clarke’s morning sickness gets far worse once they set sail on a cargo ship heading toward Arkadia.

The three of them arrive exactly three weeks after first escaping Sanctum. Kane meets them at the dock and stares quizzically as the three of them emerge.

“You’re our informant?” he asks, blinking in disbelief in Clarke’s direction.

“You didn’t know?” Bellamy huffs.

“Those were my terms,” Clarke sighs. “I had more to lose if this went south, so I asked Santiago to keep my name a secret.”

Kane runs his hand through his long, graying hair and shakes his head. “I thought it was one of Wallace’s servants. Servants always make our best spies.”

“When you don’t abandon them, they do,” Murphy mutters, hitting Kane’s shoulder with his own and he storms past him toward the car. Bellamy wasn’t trained at the same time as Murphy, so he can’t be sure which spy he is so angry about. Does it really matter? The entire network ended up abandoned when the borders got tricky. Bellamy and Murphy should be angry about all of them.

And he is. Well, he was. He probably will be again. But right now, he’s too tired to be angry. Bellamy just wants a good night’s sleep and something with actual flavor to eat. The anger can wait.

Murphy is already seated in the backseat when the rest of them get to the car. Bellamy takes the front with Kane, and Clarke joins a disgruntled Murphy in the back. The drive to the boarding house is silent save for Kane occasionally pointing out new buildings that have emerged downtown since Bellamy left for Sanctum.

Gabriel Santiago greets them inside the boarding house. Despite all his work in Sanctum, Bellamy had never been in the same room with the man. He’s heard everything, though. Everything from petty gossip surrounding his broken engagement to his crimes against Lightbourne.

But here, he just looks like a man all comfortable in his wool sweater and ready to settle down with his newspaper for the night. Looking at him, you’d never suspect this gentleman narrowly escaped with his life.

He hugs Clarke for a long time, whispering how relieved he is to see that she made it out alive. She mutters something that must be funny because he barks out an easy laugh.

Murphy slinks up the stairs without being dismissed and without saying a word. Gabriel’s eyes follow him up the stairs, and he whispers, “Murphy?” Clarke nods. He turns his gaze to Bellamy. “Blake?” he asks, and Bellamy reaches out his hand. 

As they greet each other, Kane runs through the rules of the boarding house as if Bellamy hasn’t already heard them a hundred times already. Still, it is new for Clarke. He puts Clarke in her own room since she’s the only woman in the house, a small detail that tells Bellamy just how much has changed since he was trained here.

There had always been a hesitation toward female recruits even though Monroe and Harper were far better students than Monty and Bellamy had been. The sexist doubt grew when Echo defected, and he imagines that Pike finally got his way and cut all female recruits from the program after Kane’s best students, Monroe and Harper, met their ends in front of a firing squad.

Bellamy is to share a room with Murphy, which isn’t happening. He’s not leaving Clarke’s side for even a moment, and Kane can find a way to get over it.

He keeps explaining where everything is to Clarke, who seems to be watching him intently but not quite listening. She probably feels a bit like Bellamy, unsure of whether or not to be upset with the people in this very building. The man whose decision to not honor the deal to get her out of Sanctum is discussing dinner with her, and the man who promised to get her out of there is beaming proudly beside her as if this was all part of the plan. Bellamy wouldn’t blame her if she feels angry. He does. At least on her behalf. He knew what he was signing up for long before he got to Sanctum. Bellamy was prepared to die for his country just like all the soldiers enlisting… but that was before Clarke. And the baby. So, while Bellamy isn’t angry about his own life being discarded by his superiors, he’s furious about theirs.

“And if there is anything else I can do for you—”

“A recommendation for a doctor would be nice,” Clarke interrupts. Kane’s eyes drift from her to Bellamy, seeming to have already made the connection. “And a divorce, while you’re at it.”

Bellamy stifles a laugh at her flippant tone, but neither Kane nor Gabriel join in. They look at each other, eyes wide, communicating something that Bellamy can’t decipher. For two men who work in this field, they’re not particularly good at being subtle.

It seems like they’re playing chicken, trying to see which one of them will break first. Finally, Kane sighs and turns back to Clarke. “About that,” he says carefully, and Bellamy takes a step closer to Clarke and sets his hand at her back. “I had assumed that someone would have told you the news.”

Her hand finds his and she squeezes it so hard it might break.

“He’s dead,” Kane whispers, keeping his face completely neutral as if unsure whether Clarke would consider this news horrible or wonderful. Clarke doesn’t give anything away, just looks at him quizzically. How is what she wants to know. Bellamy too. Men like Cage Wallace don’t die so easily. But Lightbourne could have found out about his safe house across the sea and the money he’s been hiding away. Had him executed. There could have been another bombing that they didn’t get news of on their trip here. Or perhaps he was mobbed when he went into town by the very people whose lives he ruined with those monstrous weapons of his and all that whispering into Lightbourne’s ear about Sanctum’s greatness.

But none of those things killed the terrible Cage Wallace.

“It was an accident,” Gabriel says. Bellamy doesn’t have to look at Clarke to know that she’s holding her breath. “A stupid one, frankly. He was out hunting, and his gun backfired.”

So, her plan worked. She killed him.

It’s a suiting death, really. He was all alone. Killed by the weapon he put into the hands of thousands. Died at the hands of his own wife, and he didn’t even know it. Underestimated her right until the very end.

Kane and Gabriel look somber, though Bellamy knows that when they received the news they must have celebrated. The commiserating expression exists only because his widow stands before them, studying them just as intently as they’re studying her.

“Well,” Clarke finally says, still not betraying a thing in her face. Kane has the same look in his eyes as he did the day he recruited Bellamy, the one he gets when he’s pretty sure he’s found a good recruit. “Lightbourne’s pocketbook must be relieved to finally be rid of the middleman.” With that, she heads to the stairs. Bellamy is right on her heels, and just like Murphy did, he leaves without being dismissed.

They step into the small room, and as soon as the door is shut, his lips press into her cheek.

“Is this real?” she whispers, and as he turns her around in his arms, her cheeks are wetted with relieved tears. Bellamy takes her face between his hands and nods. “It’s over?”

“It’s over.” Well, their fight is over. The war still goes on all around them, but they’re safer here. “We’re done,” he promises.

They’re too tired to do anything but kiss, but God, do they kiss. Celebratory at first, then reluctant to pull away so they may get ready for bed. Sleepy as they press against each other on the thin twin mattress. Sweet between quiet words about what happens next. Bellamy never knew there were so many different ways to kiss someone.

The only plan agreed upon is that they leave in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Clarke wants to take Murphy with them. Bellamy is less sure about that but will probably wake him up to ask if he wants to leave with them anyway. He’ll leave his resignation letter outside Kane’s bedroom door, and he’ll never look back.

The rest… he’s unsure about.

“I think we should get married,” he tells her between one of those sweet kisses.

“That’s the worst proposal I’ve heard, and I’ve already heard two,” she teases.

“But you like me better than the other two,” he chuckles, and Clarke pretends to mull it over. “Come on. I love you. You love me. We’re having a baby. Marry me.”

“Another terrible proposal. Besides, I only just now got rid of my last husband. I might not be all that eager to add another to the collection.” There’s a smirk on her lips as she tries to roll away, but Bellamy catches her and kisses it right off her lips. “Ask me,” she giggles as she dodges his mouth.

“Fine.” Bellamy pushes up on his elbows to look up at her. One of his legs dangles off the small bed, but he doesn’t dare ruin this moment by trying to fix that and making the old bed creak again. “Will you ma—”

“Yes,” she interrupts, and if he weren’t so delighted, he would groan in frustration. Only Clarke would badger him for a proper proposal only to interrupt him. But still, his heart stutters happily as their lips meet. The _not yet_ from before is dead and gone. The future he so desperately wants is finally in his grasp after months of longing for it.

They hardly sleep. They take turns waking each other up with questions about what happens next. Tomorrow, they’ll set off toward Bellamy’s old home that is currently empty since Octavia is serving as a nurse. But do they stay there or start over somewhere new? House or apartment? Country or city? Do they wait for Octavia to return before marrying? Do they get married tomorrow? What can Bellamy be if not a spy? What will their baby’s name be? How many babies will there be?

Neither of them can answer any of these questions. That should be terrifying. But it’s exhilarating. A whole future unwritten. Lists of questions only time will answer, and he can’t wait to see what the answers end up being.

Clarke smiles as they debate potential answers, and he knows why. Neither of them ever thought they would get to ask these questions before, and now, their lives are full of them. All they know is that they want to be happy, as simple as that sounds.

In the morning, Murphy does decide to go with them. Bellamy adds his name to the resignation letter, and the three of them walk out the front door together with only a vague destination in mind.

They’re on a new mission. One they intend to spend their whole lives completing.


End file.
